Even faster speeds to follow thanks to Telesat and Kepler’s LEO plans
OTTAWA – Residents of Nunavut will soon be able to watch movies over the web just like other Canadians down south through a high-speed broadband satellite connection provided by Ottawa-based Telesat later this summer.
Telesat’s Telstar 19 Vantage satellite is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida on July 22, and should be operational by late August or early September, according to Michele Beck, vice-president of North American sales for Telesat’s enterprise and broadcast group.
The geostationary satellite, situated 36,000 kilometres above the equator, will deliver between 20 and 25 gigabits of Internet capacity throughout Nunavut via two Internet service providers: Bell Canada’s northern subsidiary, Northwestel, and independent operator SSi Micro.
Northwestel provides DSL services in some of Nunavut’s larger communities and will collaborate with Bell Mobility to deliver wireless services, which SSi Micro offers exclusively in 25 communities throughout the eastern territory.
The good news for businesses, government offices and the nearly 36,000 residents of Nunavut – most of whom are web-connected – is that Telstar 19 will significantly increase connection speeds from the current three megabits-per-second to 15 Mbps, or faster than what some people living in remote regions of the Northwest Territories and Yukon can obtain.
Telstar 19 will provide Nunavut with faster and more reliable access to e-commerce, online education and telehealth-care, and significantly assist researchers and the Department of National Defence in its activities in the North, according to Beck, who is featured in a new online campaign by the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries called “My North My Home.”
Her profile highlights the many advantages high-speed Internet access brings to the North, such as providing online or virtual medical consultations to northerners requiring them to fly south for those services.
Last year, the CRTC set a new target of 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload for broadband Internet access services on fixed and mobile wireless networks in urban centres as well as in rural and remote areas of Canada. “Northwestel procured most of our capacity and will provide 15 Mbps per household, which goes a long way to achieving that CRTC goal,” said Beck. “This initiative will provide faster and more reliable broadband that opens Nunavut further to the world.”
She explained that a primary challenge in bringing high-speed broadband service to Nunavut is been the lack of road access between towns. “You have to fly into every community. There is no fibre, no other means for communications – it’s all satellite today,” Beck said.
“We believe that this satellite will be transformative, at least in the short term, for people living in Nunavut because it will add a significant amount of broadband Internet capacity. But we know that this won’t satisfy the long-term needs that are continually growing, so we are continuing to look at and develop further solutions that will bring cost-effective broadband to the North.”
Low Earth Orbit
Telesat is working on plans to deploy a LEO constellation of low-earth-orbit satellites that will be able to provide “hundreds of gigabits and terabits of connectivity, not just in the North, but globally by 2022,” she said.
Telesat isn’t the only one in the LEO game though. Samer Bishay also has his sights set on providing high-speed wireless Internet service in the North within that timeframe through his Kepler Communications, the Toronto-based satellite communications service company he co-founded three years ago. It aims to have its own constellation of 50 low-orbit satellites operational by the end of 2020.
“We will provide connectivity of 400 megabits-per-second for anyone north of 60 degrees latitude,” said Bishay, who is also president and chief executive officer of Iristel Inc. and mobile network operator, Ice Wireless Inc.
He explained Kepler’s plan is to sell small user broadband terminals that “could fit into a backpack and provide “connectivity and mobility anywhere in the North without requiring the need to haul a satellite dish with you.”
Kepler had applied for but never received $50 million from the federal government’s Connecting Canadians program, despite Northwestel having received that same amount in federal funding from the same program last year as part of the company’s high-speed initiative with Telesat in Nunavut, says Bishay.
Bishay said that Kepler will rely on investors to help get the satellite constellation off the ground. “If the Canadian government had given us the money we requested, we could have provided the entire North with real-time, high-speed throughput at an eventual rate of as much as two gigabits-per-second for a fraction of the cost of leasing a transponder in an area only the size of Nunavut,” Bishay said.
Kepler has already launched one satellite that will eventually provide real-time monitoring of permafrost levels and seismic activity in the North once Kepler’s satellite constellation is in operation, he added.
“This will be a more efficient and cost-effective process since it will eliminate the need to fly someone into a northern community and gather data, which would then need to be updated,” explained Bishay.
