Telstra has stopped migrating its remote small cell mobile base stations onto low earth orbit satellites backhaul until its constellation provider, Eutelsat OneWeb, can get more craft into service.
A spokesperson for Telstra confirmed to iTnews that the carrier had paused the rollout when asked about comments by Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady at the carrier’s half-year results presentation late last week.
“We have rolled out, using the OneWeb LEO satellite constellation, backhaul over their satellites to some of our remote sites [but] their rollout of their satellite constellation hasn’t gone as planned on their side,” Brady said at the presentation.
“It does mean today there are some issues particularly impacting voice. However, in terms of data performance, we have seen significant improvements by being able to access that LEO satellite service.
“We have rolled it out to a relatively small number of sites to date. That rollout is not going further right now as we work out what is the right balance to find here. It does provide real benefits much more capacity, much better performance in terms of data over those sites,” she added.
Telstra’s spokesperson confirmed that the carrier paused the rollout to due insufficient numbers of LEOsats in Eutelsat’s OneWeb constellation.
“To clarify, what Vicki meant when she referred to the rollout not going further right now is that we have paused further conversions from GEO to LEO backhaul while we wait for new OneWeb LEO satellites to come into service,” the spokesperson said.
It’s understood that Telstra operates around 200 small cell mobile base stations serving remote communities around Australia.
iTnews sought further details about the number of installations impacted by the rollout pause, however Telstra did not respond in time for publication.
As previously reported by iTnews, the number of remote Telstra mobile service outages deemed to have a significant community impact has risen sharply since 2024 – about the time when Telstra started moving the sites from geostationary backhaul to OneWeb’s LEO service.
The number of mobile tower outages causing “significant community impact”, increased from 3614 in 2024 to 5221 in 2025.
Prior to that, in the calendar years 2022 and 2023, the number of outages that Telstra recorded across the remote mobile network had remained relatively stable.
At the time, Telstra told iTnews that coverage gaps in OneWeb’s LEOsat constellation were causing the base stations to lose their ability to provide triple zero calls for periods of 10 to 15 minutes twice per day, impacting triple zero services.
However, Better Internet for Rural, Regional and Remote Australia (BIRRR), a community group that advocates for telco users in the bush, told iTnews that Telstra was understating the impact of the outages, especially on voice calls.
BIRRR said that the callers frequently lost voice communication when using the base stations, even when they remain connected to the satellites.
iTnews confirmed at least one incident of an apparent triple zero communication failure incident involving one of the base stations at Tirranna Springs in Queensland late last year.
Jil Wilson, the owner of the roadhouse at Tirranna Springs involved in the incident, provided iTnews with details of the incident which happened last September.
She said that when she tried to use her mobile to call triple zero, the operator was unable to understand her requests due to voice dropouts.
Wilson said she was eventually able to reach emergency services and get an ambulance dispatched to her property to attend to a staff member who had received burns after his car battery exploded.
However, the process was delayed by wranglings with a number of telecommunication technologies before she could achieve that using her local knowledge of staff at the nearest hospital.
Queensland Ambulance Service later confirmed for iTnews that it received a triple zero call that resulted in an ambulance being dispatched to take a man to a healthcare facility about 30 kilometres from the roadhouse to be treated for burns.
BIRRR co-founder Kristy Sparrow is expected to address a regional telecommunications policy event in Canberra hosted by CommsDay later today.
Mike Johns, senior manager of the satellite working group within telco lobby that Australian Telecommunications Association, is also expected to speak at the event.
