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Tuesday, 2024-Nov-5 — Australia 5G Cellular Site Counts

Australia has 23,346 cellular, 2,421 NBN & 4,689 TPG sites. The table below shows an increasing portion of these cellular sites support 5G:

# 5G Cellular Sites Across Australia
Licensee2018-Jan2019-Jan2020-Jan2021-Jan2022-Jan2023-Jan2024-Jan2024-Nov
Telstra 1 283 1,314 4,312 4,491 4,775 5,592 5,845
Optus 1 208 808 1,264 2,024 2,886 3,800 4,270
Vodafone 0 0 86 222 1,515 2,518 3,249 3,720

This table captures the annual growth of 5G cellular sites across Australia, as reported by Australia Cellular Services.

Wednesday, 2024-Aug-28 — Terms & Conditions

The following terms & conditions apply to subscribers of

  1. Australia Cellular Services
  2. Canada Cellular Services
  3. New Zealand Cellular Services
  4. 3-D Fresnel Zone
  1. Our refund policy.
  2. Our seat policy explains how you can share your subscription with others.

Our privacy policy:

  1. We ask only for information necessary to create and communicate with you about your subscription.
  2. We store your email address, name, business name, country and postal / zip code.
  3. We do not store your credit card information, but only pass it to Stripe to bill your card.
  4. We do not use any third party agencies (other than Stripe as described above) to manage our relationship with you.
  5. Your postal / zip code is required for credit card validation.
  6. We ask for your country because if you're in Canada, we use your postal code to determine the sales tax to apply to your purchase.
  7. We log usage activity for troubleshooting / support enquires; we delete logs after one year.

Wednesday, 2024-Jul-3 — Canada 5G Prices — Approaching international norms

Canadian 5G (SIM-only) prices are trending towards international norms. But they're still 2 to 3 times what Australians pay.

We include Australian prices, because it has a similar culture, economy, land mass and population distribution. So, prices should be similar — but they're not.

(All prices are CAD, taxes included. Bundled prices require purchasing home internet, TV, etc. After plan limit is consumed, speed reduced to 0.5 mbps in Canada and 2.0 mbps in Australia.)

SIM Only 5G Plans (in $CAD)
  2023-Aug 2023-Oct 2024-Jul
CountryCarrier Plan $ / GB Plan $ / GB Plan $ / GB
AUSVodafone$57 / 600GB$0.10$57 / 600GB$0.10$63 / 360GB$0.18
AUSOptus$60 / 500GB$0.12$60 / 500GB$0.12$63 / 500GB$0.13
AUSTelstra$83 / 300GB$0.28$66 / 300GB$0.22$87 / 300GB$0.29
CADRogers$119 / 150GB$0.79$119 / 150GB$0.79$79 / 200GB$0.40
CADTelus$119 / 150GB$0.79$119 / 150GB$0.79$90 / 200GB$0.45
CADBell$119 / 150GB$0.79$96 / 120GB$0.80$90 / 200GB$0.45
CADRogers Bundle$62 / 120GB$0.52$68 / 200GB$0.34
CADTelus Bundle$102 / 150GB$0.68$68 / 200GB$0.34
CADBell Bundle$62 / 120GB$0.52$68 / 200GB$0.34

Tuesday, 2024-Jun-18 — Videotron / Freedom

14 months ago, Videotron acquired Freedom Mobile. Today, Canada Cellular Services merged these two licensees into one, both as a filter and in channel details, as shown at the right.

Prior to the merge, there were 1,501 Videotron sites and 2,413 Freedom sites. After the merge, there are 3,505 combined Videotron / Freedom sites.

Filter combines Videotron & Freedom

New Videotron / Freedom filter

Channel details combine Videotron & Freedom

Videotron / Freedom appearing as one licensee in a site's channel details

Friday, 2024-Apr-5 — April Spectrum Data Update (Canada)

We periodically update the graphs you see below, which track the dismal quality of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) spectrum data. This month's graphs show Telus losing 38% of its spectrum (green line in top-left graph) and 45% of its sites (green line in bottom-left graph). Of course, Telus isn't scaling down operations and leaving Canada. It's just another oops from ISED, which finally acknowledged that they have serious data quality problems.

ISED SMS snapshots should never be used as-is. We monitor SMS snapshots and supplement with proprietary and 3rd party data giving Canada Cellular Services the most accurate representation available of Canada's wireless landscape.

NB. We no longer graph channel counts because a channel means different things to different wireless operators and thus has no relevance. In its place, we offer Occupied Spectrum which roughly measures overall network capacity. And site count (minus DAS sites) remains a good measure of network coverage.


Occupied Spectrum (GHz)
Rogers, Telus, Bell occupied spectrum graph for past 18 months
Occupied Spectrum (GHz)
Freedom, Videotron, SaskTel, Eastlink occupied spectrum graph for past 18 months

Site Counts
Rogers, Telus, Bell site count graph for past 18 months
Site Counts
Freedom, Videotron, SaskTel, Eastlink site count graph for past 18 months

Wednesday, 2024-Jan-31 — Canada's Spectrum Data — Garbage-In-Garbage-Out

Since 2012, we have repeatedly warned that Canada's wireless spectrum data should never be used as-is, stating An organization that makes decisions directly from this raw data exposes itself to risks and liabilities. Nonetheless, it has been used for

compliance verifications, interference investigations, as well as international coordination efforts along shared borders. The information is also used by licensees in support of inter-operator domestic and international coordination, as well as tower and site sharing between licensees. [ Ref ]

Canada's spectrum data cannot support the activities above or any other where money or public safety is involved.

12 years after our first warning, Canada's federal government finally responded:

a growing need to substantially improve data quality, reliability and uniformity within the Spectrum Management System (SMS).

We're not confident their action plan will substantially improve data quality, as it doesn't identify why the data is so bad. Their 50 page document mentions quality only three times. To fix something, you first need to know what went wrong. We suspect the data quality issue relates to the existing complex data ingest workflow, from wireless operator to government, poor data requirement documentation, poor validation checks and confusing error diagnostics.

Fortunately, their document rejected recommendations from some wireless operators to use a RESTful API interface for the ingest process, which New Zealand's spectrum agency had the misfortune of adopting. It imposes excessive complexity and overhead, endearing to bureaucratic IT departments or high-priced consulting firms looking to boost their billable hours. It does nothing whatsoever to address data quality. So, again, we're glad the Canadian government didn't embrace these fashionable technical buzzwords in their pursuit of data quality.

We hope that government and wireless operators can deliver on the need to substantially improve spectrum data quality.

Tuesday, 2024-Jan-2 — Copernicus DEM 30 2023_1 Update Now Available

Update 2024-Mar-27: Official documentation Release notes for Copernicus DEM 30m showing mention of Moldova as new coverage for the 2023_1 release states Free & Open release of the restricted countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Moldova. This is incorrect; Copernicus DEM 30 has always included Moldova.

Copernicus DEM (COP30) is a free-to-use, high quality 30m surface digital elevation model. COP30 receives small annual updates; its 2023_1 update appeared a few days ago, and includes two improvements:

Improvement #1: 26 New DEM Files

25 new DEM files covering all of Armenia and Azerbaijan, as illustrated by the animation below. (The 26th new DEM file covers a small area in Antarctica.) With these new files, COP30 finally covers all 149 million km2 of earth's land mass at 30m horizontal resolution.

Armenia and Azerbaijan (before and after 2023_1 update)

25 new DEM tiles from the Copernicus DEM 30 2023_1 release that cover Armenia and Azerbaijan

Improvement #2: 12 Edited DEM Files

Minor edits along river banks to 10 files over the entirety of Moldova, 1 file in Central Bolivia and 1 file in Northern India. The animation below highlights a typical edit along the bank of a river near the Moldova / Romania border.

Edited Pixels Hilighted in Yellow (near 48.25N, 26.65E)

An animation that shows pixels modified by Copernicus DEM 30 DGED release 2023_1

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