Both forecasts positioned mmWave as a complement to mid-band for dense hotspots and venues, rather than as a broad-area coverage layer.
Analysys Mason reported that European operators saw further deployments, including in countries such as Australia, as helping to build the global 26 GHz equipment and device ecosystem.
Australia's mobile operators—Vodafone, Telstra and Optus—had all deployed mmWave by 2021.
mmWave grew at first, but site additions fell sharply after 2022-23.
As the graph below shows, mid-band has passed 15,000 sites while mmWave has flattened just above 1,000.
Annual mmWave additions peaked at 588 in 2022-23, then fell to 162, 23, and just 2 last year.
Australia is not alone.
South Korea, one of the world's earliest 5G markets, succeeded with mid-band but not with mmWave.
Operators deployed only a fraction of their mandated mmWave sites, and
the regulator canceled
the mmWave assignments of LG Uplus and KT in 2022, then canceled SK Telecom's in 2023.
Canada's May 2026 announcement of a
2027 mmWave auction
shows the same constraint from the policy side: smaller license areas for targeted access, plus tower-siting reforms to reduce deployment friction.
Those changes do not show that mmWave will scale; they point to siting cost as central to whether it can.
Site Count Understates the Differences
Australia's site count gap now stands above 13-to-1: 15,263 mid-band vs 1,154 mmWave, and the annual additions show why it keeps widening—mmWave has all but stopped adding sites while mid-band has not.
But even 13-to-1 understates the gap.
One mmWave site serves far less area than a mid-band site: shorter range, weaker penetration, and heavy dependence on near line-of-sight.
A mmWave cell reaching 200 m covers roughly 100× less area than a mid-band cell spanning one to several kilometers—and there are 13× fewer of them.
By total coverage footprint, then, the real gap is closer to 1,000-to-1 than 13-to-1.
Annual Site Additions (Jun-Jun)
Period
mid-band
mmWave
2018-19
638
n/a
2019-20
2,915
n/a
2020-21
2,757
64
2021-22
2,377
315
2022-23
2,105
588
2023-24
1,664
162
2024-25
1,607
23
2025-26
1,082
2
mmWave additions peaked in 2022-23 and fell every year since.
Why Deployment Stalled
mmWave's far shorter range demands many more sites to match a mid-band footprint, each one placed, powered, and backhauled.
That makes mmWave's cost per served user much higher, and capital has followed the cheaper option.
Many handsets sold outside the United States lack mmWave support; Apple, for example, includes mmWave only in its U.S. iPhones.
That limited the number of Australian users who could benefit from mmWave.
Conclusion
Australia now answers a question that was still open in 2020.
Even in the United States, the largest mobile mmWave deployment, mmWave remains targeted capacity rather than national coverage.
Australia went further in the other direction: mmWave stopped growing while mid-band continued to scale.
For spectrum planners, mmWave is a localized capacity asset, not a coverage solution.
For investors, mid-band is where national scale develops.
mmWave only pays off where high demand, clear line of sight, and no cheaper option are all true; that is a site-specific business case, not a national network strategy.
3D Fresnel Zone KML Export UpdatedFriday, 2026-May-8
Optimize wireless links in
Google Earth Web
with guided views, site antenna models, and improved Fresnel-zone visibility.
A wireless link depends on more than a clear line of sight. Around that line is the Fresnel zone: a 3D area where terrain, trees, or buildings can still affect the signal. If too much of that zone is blocked, capacity and reliability can suffer.
Google Earth Web can make that hidden Fresnel zone visible over real terrain. Instead of relying only on a path profile, users can rotate around the path and see where terrain, trees, or buildings may begin to affect link quality.
Loxcel has supported this kind of visual path review for years through its 3D Fresnel Zone KML export, both after
Find Best
identifies candidate cellular sites and in the standalone
RF Link & Fresnel Zone KML Tool
when both endpoints are already known.
The updated export makes that Google Earth workflow much more useful. The KML now opens with a readable path summary and a better-organized folder tree. It also adds guided viewpoints, site geometry with antenna panels, upper and lower Fresnel rendering, endpoint elevation adjustment, and free-space path loss.
In addition to line of sight, Fresnel geometry, and milestones, the export now gives users a fuller RF inspection view around the path.
Improved Path Summary
The KML description panel has been updated for Google Earth Web.
It now shows key path details: distance, bearing, Fresnel percentage, K-factor, frequency, free-space path loss, endpoint coordinates, antenna heights, elevation adjustments, and support contact.
That keeps the RF context visible while users review the terrain, line of sight, Fresnel zone, viewpoints, and site geometry.
Endpoint Elevation Adjustment
Google Earth’s terrain and Loxcel’s elevation source are not always identical at endpoint locations.
Because the KML geometry is positioned using above-sea-level (ASL) elevation, a difference between the two terrain models can make the line of sight and Fresnel zone appear too high or too low relative to Google Earth’s visible ground.
The updated KML export includes Bullseye and Site elevation adjustments for 3D KML.
You can tune each endpoint to align the line of sight and Fresnel zone with the Google Earth scene.
Fresnel Views Built for Inspection
The KML now includes a Fresnel Viewpoints folder with views from above and from both sides of the path, plus optional camera views at distance milestones.
Users can review the path step by step from one endpoint to the other, making it easier to check the entire route.
More importantly, the top half of the Fresnel zone can be turned off while the bottom half remains visible. That small change makes obstruction checks much easier because terrain, trees, or buildings are no longer hidden behind the upper surface.
Improved Path Summary
Terrain obstruction is visible with the Fresnel top half hiddenTerrain obstruction is obscured with the Fresnel top half shown
Google Earth Web view showing the line of sight, Fresnel zone, and donor site geometry in terrain context.
Better Google Earth Web RF Inspection
Together, these updates make the KML export more useful in Google Earth Web.
Users can review the path, inspect Fresnel clearance, adjust endpoint elevation, and keep RF context visible while working directly in Google Earth Web.
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.
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.
