SpaceX’s Starlink beta test in Northern Ontario being hailed a success so far
By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA and KENORA – After testing SpaceX’s satellite beta service in northwestern Ontario, David Brown (above), the CEO of Kenora, Ontario-based information technology company FSET, is convinced low earth orbit satellite broadband is the “only path forward” for Indigenous communities.
“We unboxed the [Starlink] unit on the ground outside, [powered it on], and we were videoconferencing” — all within 20 minutes, he told the House of Commons industry committee on Tuesday. The INDU committee is meeting with various stakeholders to once again examine affordable and accessible broadband and telecom.
“It really is that simple, as it’s been designed to be,” Brown said. “It is everything they say it is, if not more. So the first 15 units we installed over the course of three days (for capacity building)” in Pikangikum First Nation in northwestern Ontario.
SpaceX launched the “Better Than Nothing” beta in Canada last month (or, “Beta than nothing”), only a couple of weeks after launching in the United States. The one-time unit price is $649 and the monthly service fee is $129. SpaceX received authorization last month from Innovation Canada to operate in Canada as a fixed satellite service provider, but is using borrowed spectrum. The company does not yet have its own dedicated spectrum.
The speed of deployment was an uncommon experience, Brown told the committee, that radically departed from what he went through with traditional telecommunications companies where “it is a slow, cumbersome process, and there is no sense of urgency with regards to their deliverables,” Brown said.
“Terms and contracts are lengthy — typically seven or 10 years is what they’re looking for — there are early termination fees ranging anywhere from 50 to 100% of those seven to 10 years they’re looking for; pricing is uncertain and additional fees and services can often, and do often, apply,” he added.
Satellite services like Starlink, he said on the other hand, bring agility, scalability, timeliness and price certainty. “The process takes days, not years,” the installation is simple — “minutes before you’re online” — and “consumers are under no obligation, there are no contracts and commitments, [and] there are no early termination fees.”
And it’s fast, he said. SpaceX advertises Starlink as being able to deliver download speeds of between 50 Mbps and 150 Mbps. Brown said the community was able to get 130 Mbps download and between 20 and 30 Mbps upload — well above the 50/10 universal service objective set by the CRTC.
Latency, the measure of how quickly a round-trip communication takes between devices and the satellites, was solid, too, Brown said: “30 milliseconds or so, so that allows [the community] to do business in real time.” (Ed note: We tested our big-city broadband as he spoke and watched on ParlVu and were getting 44 Mbps down and 10.3 Mbps up, with 33 ms latency.)
Last week, a British Columbia official said at a conference late last month that rural and remote communities need help applying for federal broadband funding because they are less experienced with the process and Brown said Tuesday the processes are even more complicated because the holiday season is now coming up, and these communities don’t have the connectivity to do business online – and the Universal Broadband Fund’s rapid stream deadline of mid January is coming up fast.
When the INDU committee convened in mid November, Dan Goldberg, CEO of Canadian satellite darling Telesat, said he was “worried” about being able to compete against SpaceX, a company with much more capital than it to play in a space that requires a lot of money for coverage. And that was before Starlink won nearly $900 million in subsidies from the Federal Communications Commission this week, Stateside.
Brown said the communities he has worked with are moving toward having 60 total Starlink units deployed. They are communities which halted basic services during the pandemic, with none of the relative luxuries of the urbanites, such as being able to do business online. “I have no sympathy for telecommunications companies in Canada, based on what I’ve faced and had to deal with and what I see these communities fighting for.
“We got tired of banging our heads against the wall to solve a problem by approaching it the same way it’s always been approached, using terrestrial telecommmunications companies to do it with and we went to SpaceX and it was like a barn-raising.” – David Brown, FSET
“(The traditional telecoms) have had the opportunity to be competitive. They have had a head start on everyone else. They have had funding and support from taxpayers, provincial governments, federal governments, and they have failed to deliver solutions and alternatives for Indigenous communities,” Brown continued,
“They’re not asking for 4K Netflix,” he said. These remote communities are asking to hear court cases virtually, to do business, to connect to the rest of the world and their families in real time. “We got tired of banging our heads against the wall to solve a problem by approaching it the same way it’s always been approached, using terrestrial telecommmunications companies to do it with, and we went to SpaceX and it was like a barn-raising,” where folks in the community happily worked together to bring fast broadband to their neighbours.
“The ability to deliver [satellite services] in a timely manner, scalable without terrestrial-based solutions is probably the only way that’s an effective use of taxpayer dollars and a way to invest in something that’s going to help these communities,” Brown said.
Brown recalled a conversation he had with a member of a large telecom company just this week. “The feedback was: ‘there’s Vancouver and there’s Toronto, there’s a couple of speed bumps in Calgary and in between and the rest really doesn’t much matter, and that approach is exactly why we’re here, why these communities are where they are, and so it took a different approach to solve this problem — and satellite-based solutions are that.”
Of course, Starlink has very, very few beta customers on its LEO network right now. The quality of its service may well be a different story when it starts to scale up.
The hearing also played host to the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, whose executive director John Lawford suggested that the government should consider installing a central command centre — or a “broadband czar” — to co-ordinate all the different broadband programs available.
