Telstra awarded 131 cell sites under Black Spot program

Australia’s Telstra has announced it has been awarded 131 sites as part of the fourth round of the government’s Mobile Black Spot program.

The operator will deploy a mixture of new mobile base stations and small cells at the 131 locations, and will contribute $23.3 million of the $55.6 million co-investment required to fund the new sites, with the remainder coming from the federal and state governments.

The new sites will include 49 in New South Wales, 23 in Western Australia, 22 in Victoria, 19 in South Australia, and 18 in Queensland.

Telstra said it has so far deployed more than 550 new mobile base stations across regional and rural Australia as part of the Mobile Black Spot program.

Meanwhile the operator expects to have spent a total of around A$8 billion ($5.66 billion) in total mobile investment over the five years ending in June, with nearly A$3 billion of this spent in rural areas.

“Our investments will help towns and communities relying on mobile connected devices more than ever before,” Telstra CEO Andy Penn said.

“The partnerships we have formed with Governments at all levels are providing connectivity and services to many areas of Australia where it was otherwise uneconomical to do so.”

He said Telstra’s mobile network now spans nearly 10,000 base stations covering more than 2.5 million square kilometers.

The announcement came shortly after the government revealed it has allocated a further A$160 million for the Mobile Black Spot program, which has now been extended to a further two rounds.