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Australia has 23,212 cellular, 2,378 NBN and 4,333 TPG sites. Of the cellular sites, a growing portion support 5G. This table captures the growth of 5G cellular sites across Australia, as reported by Australia Cellular Services:
| Licensee | 2018-Jan | 2019-Jan | 2020-Jan | 2021-Jan | 2022-Jan | 2023-Jan | 2024-Jan | 2024-Apr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Telstra | 1 | 283 | 1,314 | 4,312 | 4,491 | 4,775 | 5,592 | 5,702 |
| Optus | 1 | 208 | 808 | 1,264 | 2,024 | 2,886 | 3,800 | 3,901 |
| Vodafone | 0 | 0 | 86 | 222 | 1,515 | 2,518 | 3,249 | 3,353 |
It's been 15 months since we last graphed Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) spectrum data quality, and for good reason — it was good. Well we spoke too soon, because this month, Telus lost 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 really scaling down operations and leaving Canada. It's just another oops from ISED, which recently acknowledged that they have a serious data quality problem.
SMS snapshots provided by ISED 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.
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
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:
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. New Zealand's spectrum agency adopted this buzzword-laden techno babble, which we had the misfortune of using. It imposes excessive complexity and overhead, endearing only to a bureaucratic IT department or high-priced consulting firm looking for more 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.
Update 2024-Mar-27:
Official documentation
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:
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)
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 hilights a typical edit along the bank of a river near the Moldova / Romania border.
Edited Pixels Hilighted in Yellow (near 48.25N, 26.65E)
