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As SpaceX subsidiary Starlink moves steadily towards “initial completion” of its communications satellite constellation, international partners such as One NZ are gearing up to launch services, maybe even before the end of 2024.
Whatever the date, the first service would be texting, according to Thaigan Govender, general manager of One NZ’s mobile access network.
Local and regional telecommunications partners were vital to Starlink’s success because they control spectrum, the relationship with existing customers and the capacity to recruit more.
The problem Starlink is poised to solve locally is not hard to understand: One NZ’s over 2400 cell sites service 99 per cent of New Zealand’s population on at least 4G, but only cover 60 per cent of the country’s land mass.
In response, the telco is building a multi-layered, tiered network, with SpaceX filling that gap along with cell sites from the Rural Connectivity Group, an independent body that builds, operates and maintains a 4G wireless network outside of the main centres.
In rural areas serviced by towers, hundreds of thousands of addresses rely on fixed wireless for broadband access, Govender said. However, because the population is so spread out, the load on the low-frequency part of the network was high.
This is also where the least amount of spectrum is available.
In that cause, the government is looking at releasing some 600MHz spectrum, but that is complicated because of existing uses in other fields.
Even in dense urban areas, wireless broadband plays a big role, such as servicing large stadium events where content is being delivered outwards, Govender said. Small cells and in-building systems were critical for this part of the network as well and more spectrum would eventually be required for these applications.
Millimetre-wavelength will be important to service such use-cases, especially for uplinks.
Eventually, however, 5G will be built out to cover over 95 per cent of the population using spectrum from the 2G switch-off. By 2030, telcos will also be thinking of deploying 6G, “whatever that looks like”, but with everything connected to a super high capacity and low latency network.
Infrastructure will shrink, become more focused and sit closer to the customer to give a more precise and customised user experience, Govender said. AI would be embedded to manage the complexity that would inevitably create.
However connectivity is delivered, the ability to service emergency communications, 111 calls and medical devices had to be solid.
The Next Generation Critical Communications programme is bringing such services up to speed, with One NZ and Spark delivering services such as roaming fall-back when the other couldn’t deliver.
Apart from servicing the final 40 per cent and maritime areas, SpaceX will also play a role in delivering applications in the sky, such as video streaming.
Broadly, such in-sky and other niche applications were called “non-traditional networks”, Govender said. SpaceX would play a large role in their delivery and an official telecommunications standard for these is imminent.
Starlink features again in One NZ’s development of “cellsites on wheels”, or COWs, which are being used to provide backhaul to the systems often deployed in times of disaster, such as in the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle early last year.
“We actually daisy-chain them so we get quite a large amount of capacity,” Govender said.
Apart from additional land and sea coverage, Starlink was really important during disasters.
“We saw how useful Starlink was for Cyclone Gabrielle,” Govender said. “We had cell towers but because all the backhaul links were gone we couldn’t get generators into the area so satellite was the only way to get out.”
COWs are also being redesigned and rebuilt to allow them to be deployed by first responders.
Private 5G, delivered through dedicated physical and virtual infrastructure, will also be able to be deployed for closed user groups and specific applications or devices isolated from public users.
Applications for modern, private 5G and future 6G were generally where wi-fi struggled, Govender said. Such services will play a role in ports, airports and agriculture to service, for example, autonomous vehicles and deliver computer vision.
One NZ is also leading the rollout of the City Rail Link 5G system, featuring hundreds of access points and believed to be a world first because the infrastructure will be shared with other operators.
Network delivery is set to begin in the first quarter next year among a host of other “in-building” network rollouts.
“Putting in mobile when you are building the infrastructure is the most efficient way to do it,” Govender said.
Such networks were essential for health and safety, for instance, and for the deployment of IoT and building monitoring systems.
Further improving the connectivity picture for One NZ are small cells, used to improve network capacity and coverage, deployments of which are accelerating.
All of that infrastructure now covered 99 per cent of the population on 4G and 53 per cent on 5G, he said.
Areas of further focus is the final switch-off of any remaining 3G once such services have been superceded and servicing areas of urban sprawl with new cell sites.
“Solid data connections on state highways are becoming not a nice to have but a must have, in addition to voice,” Govender added.
Of course, it is 2024 and AI is part of the picture.
“Where we want to get to is being able to characterise every customer on the network in terms of their experience, Govender said. “This is so we can see if they are having a good experience, a bad experience, an average experience; and is there a propensity to churn?
“That will inform how we invest in the network in the future.”
Rob O’Neill travelled to the USA as a guest of One NZ to see a SpaceX launch and receive a briefing.