Canada Invests $65 Million in Satellite Company To Narrow Broadband Gap For Remote Areas

The Canadian government said on Wednesday it is investing C$85 million ($64.70 million) in an Ottawa-based satellite company as part of an effort to provide better broadband internet access to rural and remote communities. From a report: Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains said the funding would be used by Telesat to build and test technologies that use low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites to boost connectivity. "This new, space-based system will provide a dramatic and disruptive improvement over existing satellites," Telesat Chief Executive Officer Dan Goldberg said, adding that the technology will be affordable and reliable. LEO satellites operate 36 times closer to the earth than traditional telecommunications satellites. This means they take less time to send and receive information, leading to better and faster broadband service, even in rural, remote and northern areas.

Election time

[Livius]

Take anything like this with a grain of salt this close to an election (October), but servicing remote areas is an interesting technological problem and maybe there's something to it.

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[Phil Urich]

Sure, but the timing is notable, particularly since it's in rural areas that the Liberals stand to lose the most in this next election.

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[ceoyoyo]

It would be notable if they had something to roll out. None of those rural voters are going to care that Ottawa invested in some company (in Ottawa) that might do something with a satellite some day.

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[sabri]

$65 million doesn't even get one province wiring job started, lest of all completed.

$65 million barely covers the cost of the launch of a satellite. Let alone the cost of designing, building, maintaining it, and the associated ground stations and networks.

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[ceoyoyo]

The $65 million is just an investment. Telesat is an established satellite communications player with lots of resources already. The $65 mil is also supposed to expand to something like $500 million to a billion over the next few years.

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[c-A-d]

So why doesn't Telesat do this on their own? Why do they need the government to "invest"? Is it because it would otherwise be a business failure?

Re: Election time

[ceoyoyo]

The government says one thing theyâ(TM)ll get is priority access to the network. So probably military and diplomatic communications.

If they want decent coverage of the north, that will definitely not be cost effective though. Starlink doesnâ(TM)t look like itâ(TM)s going to provide far north coverage, which is probably smart because they wonâ(TM)t find many subscribers (especially not HFT ones) up there. But thatâ(TM)s one of the areas that needs it most. Currently communications to

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[Jmc23]

Canadian corruption works similarily to US corruption. Liberals pay money to friends with businesses, conservatives pay money to their own businesses.

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[Jmc23]

It's enough to line their pockets with though. Nothing worse than Liberal 'investments' to 'research' possibilities. I'm ashamed at the the intelligence level of Canadians who can't see how liberals deceive with the truth.

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[bn-7bc]

And by streaming I soppose you men connwuming netflix youtube and the like, not someone doing a twitch stream via satellite, 3Mbps is a bit on the light side if you want anything above 720p30, but yea for peiople thatb want to be nice consumers the download capacity seems ok if you are the only one on the peticular modem, for multiple users at once/modem not so much. But hay way better than nothing so a step in the right direction and a ok stop gap until the get leo sats/ftth

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[c-A-d]

The only thing it will do, if it actually gets finished and I doubt it will, is provide music and video streaming to some rural areas. It might improve the quality of life but it won't increase the standard of living.

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[lazarus]

For LEO satellites to stay in orbit they must be traveling a lot faster than geostationary ones (centripetal force must be equal to the force of gravity at that hight). So they zip in and out of range quickly meaning that in order to maintain connectivity there needs to be LOTS of them and they need to hand off your connection from satellite to satellite.

It is a difficult but solvable problem and it is what SpaceX is doing now. This is just the Canadian government funding a Canadian company to help them p

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[ceoyoyo]

Telsat is an established com sat company and has been developing their LEO technology for a while. MIT apparently studied it and pronounced it better than SpaceX, for whatever that's worth.

This isn't a company that just decided LEO com sats might be a cool idea. The Canadian government investment is more to encourage an emphasis on rural Canadian customers, and to buy priority access. Starlink doesn't look like it's planned to give good coverage in the far north, for example.

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[techno_dan]

I looked into their solution as part of a review of various technologies to provide broadband to remote communities. It will not be affordable to most, and uses less satellites(120) then the other two big satellite mesh networks from SpaceX (1000 - 4,425) and OneWeb (750). Altitude and number of down links is also an issue. Telesat is targeting 1000 km, OneWeb at 1200 km, and SpaceX at 338 to 1000 km. The closer the better for latency. Down link numbers and locations will determine max bandwidth from any gi

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[c-A-d]

It won't be affordable, it'll just be the only option. They'll extend the SCoC decision about subscribing to US satellite television (the ruling stated that a canadian who subscribes to a US satellite TV provider is stealing services from Canadian cable providers, even though they are paying) to apply to this as well, and voila, now they are the only game in town!

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[bill_mcgonigle]

> Starlink doesn't look like it's planned to give good coverage in the far north, for example.

Starlink is planned to cover every square meter of Earth. The initial test rollout is focused on a band including the northern us, Southern Canada, and related areas at a similar orbital inclination.

I'll bet you $5 that Starlink is available in Northern Canada before Telsat puts up its first working models. And frankly, 65 million dollars is insufficient for Telsat to decide to try to compete with Starlink, as a

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[dryeo]

Telesat has been putting up communications satellites longer then any other commercial company, starting in 1972 with the first GEO commercial communications satellite.
Being a company, they aren't allowed to finance Federal election campaigns, only flesh and blood citizens are, with something like a $1200cdn limit. (Probably a bit higher now).

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[currently_awake]

The canadian company would need to use polar orbits, instead of the more equitorial orbits SpaceX is planning. This could work in cooperation instead of competition, think lower bandwidth and higher latency and specializing in polar regions of the globe.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[c-A-d]

In this case, it's simply our Geography. If you're not within 200km of the US border, chances are that you are in a region so sparsely populated that the population density is measured in fractions of a person per square kilometer.

$65 million won't buy much.

[Dread Cthulhu]

$65 million USD won't get you very far, in regards to building a satellite network. That's one Falcon 9 launch & spare change. IMHO it would make more sense to wait for Starlink to get its service going, and use that $65 million to subsidize antennas/service for poor people. Its going to be difficult for any satellite internet company to compete with Starlink, since they are part of SpaceX and thus will have lower launch costs than everyone else.

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[dryeo]

Starlink isn't going to be much good in the far north and we are talking about the first commercial company to get into communications satellites so they do have some 50 years experience. They also have worldwide rights to 4Ghz of ka band spectrum according to their site and should be cheaper then Starlink, at least in the north.
https://www.telesat.com/servic... [telesat.com]

What a waste!

[CanEHdian]

There are several commercial companies working on this with SpaceX already having hardware in orbit. Navdeep Bains decides to throw C$85 million at something for 'research and development' that's already there?

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[SCVonSteroids]

This Country is going to slowly get sold off. You'll see.

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[Jmc23]

But the money is being thrown at friends! Like the subsidies to create 'food security' in the north. I mean, I guess it's possible dragon fruit from a liberal friendly import company is more important than Canadian toilet paper...

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[c-A-d]

This isn't about actually providing real services. This is about looking good in front of an election that will be filled with information about SNC Lavalin and where Justin Trudeau is at real risk of losing the PM office after a single term.