Why mmWave Stalled in AustraliaMonday, 2026-Apr-27

In Australia, mmWave delivers roughly 1,000× less national coverage than mid-band 5G—and the gap shows no sign of closing.

This was not the expected trajectory. Five years ago, industry leaders like Qualcomm claimed millimeter wave (mmWave) would deliver unparalleled user experience, while Analysys Mason—a consultancy for Qualcomm and Ericsson—suggested significant economic benefits across a wide range of scenarios.

Vodafone, Telstra, Optus and NBN deployed mmWave starting in 2021. (Vodafone at 25.1-25.7 GHz, Telstra at 25.7-26.7 GHz, Optus at 26.7-27.5 GHz, and NBN at 28.5-29.5 GHz.) After roughly three years, deployments effectively stalled. This is the opposite of what was predicted: mmWave as a meaningful second 5G layer.

Australia is not alone. South Korea, a 5G leader, successfully deployed mid-band, delivering usable coverage at reasonable cost. However, mmWave saw limited adoption, reflecting high deployment costs and more constrained real-world use cases. The result was limited deployment, with regulators in some cases revoked or reduced their licenses.

Why Deployment Stalled

The problem is not that mmWave fails technically—it works. The problem is that it does not scale economically as a broad coverage layer. Short range, weak penetration, dense site spacing, precise placement, and extensive backhaul all raise deployment cost.

At the same time, mid-band 5G continues to improve and expand. Operators can add capacity across wide areas with far fewer sites and much better economics. Capital has followed that logic. In Australia, mid-band kept growing while mmWave did not.

Conclusion

Australia now provides a clear answer to a question that was still open in 2020. mmWave did not become a meaningful second national layer of 5G. It remained a niche capacity tool with limited geographic reach.

For spectrum planners, mmWave is a localized capacity asset, not a broad coverage solution. For investors, the same conclusion follows. Mid-band is where national mobile scale continues to develop. mmWave is a niche, at best.

Finding Tower Space in Canada Just Got EasierWednesday, 2026-Apr-8

Finding tower space in Canada has never been straightforward. Canada Cellular Services changes that by bringing 3,520 towerco sites into a single searchable platform, alongside carrier emissions, tenant occupancy, and vertical antenna stacking.

3,520 independently owned sites, in one place

Canada Cellular Services now includes tower portfolios from Terrion (2,816 sites), Aurora Towers (583 sites), and Shared Tower (121 sites) — bringing 3,520 independently owned tower locations into a single searchable environment alongside Canada's wireless infrastructure.

Users can filter directly by owner, or by tenancy status: Vacant, Solo (single-tenant), or Co-lo (multi-tenant). The result is an immediate, actionable view of where co-location capacity exists across the country.

What a tower company is, and why it matters

In the United States and across Europe, tower ownership and wireless network operation separated long ago. Companies like American Tower, Crown Castle, and SBA Communications own the physical infrastructure. Carriers lease space on it. Towers are designed from the outset to host multiple tenants, approval processes are streamlined, and operators can focus capital on spectrum and network rather than steel and concrete.

Canada has been slow to adopt this model. Only 10% of towers in this country are owned by independent tower companies. The major carriers — Bell, Rogers, and Telus — have historically owned the towers they use, and that concentration has made infrastructure access difficult for smaller operators and new entrants alike. Terrion, Aurora Towers, and Shared Tower are changing that, and their portfolios are now fully integrated into Canada Cellular Services.

Why co-location changes the deployment calculus

A conventional tower build in Canada — site selection, municipal consultation, permitting, community opposition, construction — routinely takes twelve months or more. NIMBYism is real, and it is expensive. Terrion advertises 30-day co-location approval on existing structures. That's the difference between 30 days and 365. For an MNO trying to densify a network or deploy new spectrum, that is not a marginal improvement. It is a fundamentally different operating model.

The towerco model works because the infrastructure is designed for shared use from the start. Towers are sized and structured to accommodate multiple tenants stacked vertically, each at its own mounting height, azimuth, and tilt. The tower company handles the structure; the carrier handles the radio.

What Canada Cellular Services shows you

Knowing a towerco site exists is only the beginning. The harder questions are: who is already on the tower, where are they positioned, and is there room for another tenant without compromising signal quality? Canada Cellular Services shows who is on each tower, where they are mounted, and whether space remains for additional tenants without interference risk.

For each site, users can identify existing tenants, distinguish vacant from occupied structures, view antenna stacking positions by tenant, assess mounting height, azimuth, and vertical tilt, and evaluate vertical separation between tenants — the critical factor in managing interference between co-located carriers.

Each site can also be exported as a 3D KML model. Panels are color-coded by tenant, positioned at actual mounting heights, oriented by azimuth, and scaled by frequency band — higher frequencies appear as shorter panels. This gives site acquisition teams and RF planners a concrete picture of available space and deployment constraints before a single site visit is scheduled.

For tower companies, this is not just visibility — it is distribution. Canada Cellular Services is used by carriers and site acquisition teams to identify deployment opportunities. Ensuring that a portfolio is accurately represented — including structure attributes, tenancy visibility, and availability — directly improves how sites are evaluated for co-location.

For operators and investors

The towerco model generates long-term contracted revenue with inflation-linked escalators and low tenant churn — which is why it attracts serious institutional capital. Northleaf Capital committed C$100 million to Shared Tower in early 2025. Canada's towerco sector is early and the inventory is still being built. For private equity and infrastructure investors, understanding what exists today — where sites are, who occupies them, and what capacity remains — is the starting point for any credible analysis.

Loxcel has been mapping Canada's wireless networks for over 15 years

Canada Cellular Services is not a new entrant to this data. Loxcel has spent more than fifteen years building and maintaining the most detailed picture of Canada's wireless infrastructure available anywhere — carrier emissions, spectrum licenses, antenna configurations, and site-level detail. The towerco integration adds a new layer to a dataset that operators, regulators, and investors have relied on for well over a decade.

No other platform in Canada currently offers this combination: independent towerco inventory, carrier emission data, tenant identification, and 3D site visualization — in a single searchable environment.

Canada Cellular Services is the starting point for identifying tower co-location opportunities in Canada.

Rebuilding Canada's Wireless Infrastructure DataFriday, 2026-Feb-27

We have updated our backoffice workflow that ingests ISED Spectrum Management System (SMS) data. The result is a stronger, cleaner, and more defensible national data foundation powering our reports and the Canada Cellular Services platform.

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) manages Canada's radio spectrum. Licensees submit technical RF data into ISED’s Spectrum Management System (SMS), and ISED publishes those submissions as monthly downloads that appear to be national snapshots of Canadian spectrum deployments. They are not. ISED has publicly acknowledged the need to improve data quality, reliability and uniformity within SMS.

In practice, SMS is a cumulative record of submissions rather than a clean monthly replacement of what changed. Older records linger, and updates may appear late or not at all. Months with no visible change do not mean the network is stable — they often mean no new submissions were processed. The transactional UPDATE / APPEND / REPLACE nature of the submission process adds further risk. Treating each monthly file as a clean snapshot leads to unreliable conclusions. Serious longitudinal analysis must reconcile cumulative submissions, upload chronology, and transactional overwrite events.

Our updated workflow is built around that reality. We reconcile cumulative submissions into coherent state transitions, filter stale and superseded records, remove structural duplicates, resolve site relocations, detect anomalous overwrite events, and restore (backfill) emissions when valid spectrum is temporarily removed due to transactional errors. The result is an operational representation of Canada’s wireless infrastructure — not a raw administrative extract.

The workflow is now live and continues to be refined as we identify edge cases and resolve residual inconsistencies.

The ISED SMS files are free. Extracting reliable network intelligence from them is not.

For RF technicians, operators, and site acquisition or investment firms, the risk isn’t downloading the data. The risk is making decisions based on it at face value.