Dense Air has acquired 200MHz of mmWave spectrum just recently. Following this step, the company is set to launch its Australian neutral host service next year. According to Dense Air chief executive Paul Senior, they are looking into a 2022 launch to complement the 5G coverage of mobile carriers. Even if the company has owned the Australian spectrum for a couple of years, their project has seen a setback because of the pandemic.

Neutral Host Networks 

“We got what we were aiming for in the auction,” the CEO said. “Obviously, this is an aggregate of the spectrum we acquired before,” he added. “The places where we were kind of short were in Sydney and Melbourne.” He proceeded on by saying, “The really significant thing is we don't need a gigahertz of spectrum to deploy small cells because they're small and you've got a small number of users connected to it. Proportionately it kind of works itself out with macrocells. If you need a small cell for every 10 macrocells, we can give the same service experience with a fraction of the amounts of spectrum.”

Dense Air is set to deliver its 5G neutral host networks with small cells, but the pandemic makes this feat challenging, particularly in having boots on the ground in Australia. The CEO further added, “Spectrum acquisition — we can do it long-range. But building the team and deploying the networks we need to get access locally. And, of course, that's been impossible for us since, really, March/April last year.” Nevertheless, he emphasised: “We remain committed to the Australian market; we want to do it.”

5G Solutions

In New Zealand, though, Dense Air has already got a team up and running. For this, they were already able to carry out some work on private LTE. But then, Senior said, “We never got to that point in Australia. Unfortunately, we got closed out before we got a chance to do it. Truthfully, we're not in control of that scenario; the Australian government is in control of that scenario. We would love to be in the marketplace already.”

According to the CEO, the company will be able to deploy rapidly as long as it is able to set up an Australian team. “A number of our solutions have very low inertia,” he said. From there, he cited Dense Air’s Magic Box: “It is an indoor small cell for doing indoor densification. We can bring that to bear, very, very quickly because, literally, I can just send you a box and you can plug it into your Internet connection. And presto you've got pervasive 5G around your business/office/home. We have solutions like that ready to go,” Senior said.