Vodafone Group Plc (ADR)(NASDAQ:VOD) Australia will cease to collocate on any of Telstra’s 429 mobile base stations. The main target will be on those, which have been built under round one of the federal government’s mobile blackspots program. The government has notably been building several provisions in an effort to encourage collocation.
However, the Department of Communications says that it will allow carriers to collocate only on 43 of its own 70 round one black spot base stations. In round two, the celebrate Telco will build out just four mobile base stations.
Rewarding of Proposed base stations
As per the provisions, any proposed base station was awarded points but only if they were supporting a collocating carrier. In return, the collocating carriers would only cater to the incremental costs given that they were being offered a discounted backhaul service where possible. The carriers were also given an opportunity to help in designing base stations.
Once all the necessities had been put into place, the government would avail additional provisions in the round two funding agreements. In the opening of the first round of funding in December 2014, both Telstra and Vodafone Australia obtained AU$185 million in government funding. This was to be used in upgrading close to 499 mobile towers across Australia.
National Broadband Network (NBN) allows VOIP allocation
NBN says that it has a special offer for each purchased service, which is intended to support voice over IP (VoIP) services. The company will allow the addition of 150Kbps prioritized data allocation to retail service providers (RSPs) of its Sky Muster satellite service.
However, NBN states, “In these instances, RSPs would also need to supply or support the end user equipment necessary to support VoIP.”
NBN is set to roll out its fixed-wireless towers in regional areas. The plan is to have a total of 2,532 towers, which will be spread out in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South and Western Australia Tasmania; and in the Northern territory.
In the meantime, Vodafone stock closed at $29.62 witnessing an increase of $0.44 or 1.51%.
