Telstra to make wholesale 5G available to MVNOs in July

Australia’s incumbent telco, Telstra, announced on Tuesday it would have its wholesale 5G service up and running by July.

Currently, mobile virtual network operators such as Aldi, Woolworths, Boost, and Telstra-brand Belong only have access to LTE connectivity. With the addition of 5G covering 75% of the population, Telstra said it would give the virtual operators access to speeds up to 250Mbps, and make use of millimetre wave where available.

The telco added that as it expanded its 5G footprint, so too would wholesale coverage expand.

As Telstra’s plans currently stand, the telco is offering 40GB for AU$55 per month, without any 5G connectivity, and customers need to pay AU$65 for 80GB with 5G access.

The company last year bumped up its small plan users onto 5G for an initial six months, however the drop back to solely LTE never happened.

At the same time, Telstra Wholesale said virtual operators would be able to extend into the IoT and wearables space, including the use of its Cat M1 network.

Last week, Nokia, Optus, and Samsung conducted a test where a pair of TDD spectrum bands was aggregated with a FDD band with the resulting 5G signal received by a commercial Samsung handset.

“Once available commercially, this 3 NR Carrier operation will enable customers to achieve a higher 5G download speed at more places improving their overall 5G experience. Our Samsung Galaxy S22 customers will soon be the first to benefit from this technology enhancement with other handsets to follow shortly after,” Optus vice president of networks Lambo Kanagaratnam said.

Overnight, Qualcomm announced it had ditched sub-6GHz in a test to hit peak speeds of 8.3Gbps using only millimetre wave spectrum.

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