A new 5G wholesale service and a series of IoT products will be offered by Telstra Wholesale starting from July. The announcement was made at its annual customer event, Business Connect.

The 5G service will initially be reaching more than 75% of Australians. It will be offering up to 250 Mbps, with access to mmWave where available.

This is considered to be a significant shift for the telco giant as neither Telstra nor TPG Telecom opened up their respective 5G networks to their MVNO partners for mobile plans. The move also comes before the greater regulatory scrutiny by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission over the telco's proposed network sharing deal with TPG.

According to executive, sales, and wholesale segment Glenn Osborne, “The ability for our MVNO customers to offer a premium 5G mobile plan, as part of their suite of mobile solutions, provides even more possibilities for these customers to unlock new growth opportunities and attract different audiences seeking the performance benefits and capacity of 5G.”

The overall objective of Telstra Wholesale 5G is to initially offer coverage to reach more than 75% of Australians. However, as its rollout continues, the telco giant intends to offer 5G coverage growth as it is deployed inside the existing Telstra Wholesale footprint. Existing 4G plan features will still be incorporated in the 5G service plans. These plans will also provide typical download speeds of 10-250Mbps.

Apart from the expanded 5G services, Telstra Wholesale is also set to launch a new customisable IoT product range. This encompasses IoT connectivity for existing scale IoT providers. With this, the latter will be able to provide value-added connectivity on the mobile network of Telstra, which includes the CatM1 network. Additionally, it will also be able to offer value-added connectivity for MVNOs. In this case, the MVNOs will be able to extend their range beyond mobile handheld and mobile broadband solutions by taking advantage of their own proposition and devices on the platform they already use. 

Finally, the product range will also include wearables and consumer IoT, as well as the Track and Monitor product of Telstra. The telco wants to target the wearable device market with “connectivity solutions for new market entrants to provide watches, cameras, pendants and other consumer devices with connectivity to their end consumers.”

“In a break from traditional wholesaling, we are offering more value-added solutions than ever before. We know our wholesale customers have diverse needs for connectivity, and so we have developed a series of innovative new products to address these needs,” said Osborne.