Announcing this on Wednesday as part of the Telstra2022 strategy, which outlined the company's plans until 2022, Telstra chief executive Andy Penn said the new strategy leveraged the capabilities that were being built through Telstra’s investment of up to $3 billion announced in August 2016 to create its so-called Networks for the Future and digitising the business.

“The network investments have been critical as Telstra builds capability in software defined networking and prepares to lead the market and win in 5G," he said.

In its announcement, Telstra said it would be dividing up the business into infrastructure and mobile divisions, the former under a new unit named Telstra InfraCo.

"The digitisation program is delivering completely new technology stacks for Consumer and Small Business and Enterprise customer segments which will be the platform for the new products we are launching.”

Penn's statements come as work continues on 5G standards. Last week, the first phase of the 5G standards process was completed during a meeting of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project plenary meeting in California, according to Telecom TV.

About 600 delegates attended and approved 5G Release 15 which provides the first standardisation phase for the mobile standard.

The 3GPP is one of the groups working on 5G standards and specifications.

In a media release, 3GPP said: "After the release of the 5G NR specifications for non-standalone (NSA) operation in December 2017, another essential step of standardisation of 5G has been successfully completed.

"Now, the whole industry is taking the final sprint towards 5G commercialisation. The completion of SA specifications which complements the NSA specifications, not only gives 5G NR the ability of independent deployment, but also brings a brand new end-to-end network architecture, making 5G a facilitator and an accelerator during the intelligent information and communications technology improvement process of enterprise customers and vertical industries.

"New business models will be enabled and a new era where everything is interconnected will be opened up for both mobile operators and industrial partners."