Telstra launches first OneWeb-connected base station

Telstra has begun replacing satellite-based mobile base station backhaul with connections over Eutelsat’s OneWeb low earth orbit satellites (LEOsats).

The carrier yesterday announced that it had made the first call using LEOsat backhaul, from a mobile base station in the Sydney northern beaches suburb of Oxford Falls.

The rollout is part of a contract between the two companies first signed in June 2023.

Telstra has also been building OneWeb teleports since March 2022.

The two organisations say the backhaul rollout, to reach more than 300 remote mobile base stations over the next 18 months, is the world’s largest.

Telstra also said it plans to use the backhaul service in new remote base stations.

The OneWeb service offers SLAs and committed information rates, Telstra said, ensuring both quality of service and high performance.

In time, Telstra expects the backhaul to support 25Gbps connections to the remote base stations.

Telstra’s executive for network and infrastructure Iskra Nikolova said the backhaul could also improve reliability where its network’s terrestrial backhaul is “susceptible to natural disasters and communities find themselves in isolation.”

Such sites will get 15 times higher performance, Nikolova said, as well as a tenfold improvement in latency.

Compared to geostationary satellites, which have 250ms latency on up- and down-links, OneWeb said its LEOsats have a typical round trip latency between 50 and 70ms.