A $2.14-billion federal loan for an Ottawa-based satellite operator has Canadian politicians arguing about whether American billionaire Elon Musk poses a national security risk.
The fight involves internet connectivity in remote regions as Canada tries to live up to its promise to connect every Canadian household to high-speed internet by 2030.
A week ago, the Liberal government announced the loan to Telesat, which is launching a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that will be able to connect the most remote areas of the country to broadband internet.
Conservative MP Michael Barrett objected to the price tag, asking Musk in a social media post how much it would cost to provide his Starlink to every Canadian household that does not have high-speed access.
LEO internet is not sustainable and should be banned.
If you want satellite internet geosync is way better. The only downside is latency but it’s not worth destroying the planet and ruining astronomy globally over.
This. I was about to write the same.
Fuck Starlink and their absurd amount of satellites. Why are things that are bad on paper still out into practice and then get people to talk about it as if its the next best thing after sliced bread? 5 Geo orbit satellites do the same and more than an entire fleet of star link satellites that would ruin Astronomy forever, not to mention the pollution, high cost, and now having these stupid dots fly visibly through the sky at night. These satellites will fall out of the sky within a decade due to their low orbit so continously require more launches to resupply them, adding pollution over pollution. None of this is even mentioning the risk for a full scale Kessler syndrome with this trash.
Fully agree, Starlink (and others like it) should be forbidden
Don’t worry next we’re going to solve the non-existent problem of metal scarcity by dragging the ocean floor. Even though it will obliterate entire ecosystems built around the nodules we’re going to mine. All so a billionaire can become a multi billionaire.
Elliptical orbits are perfect for polar regions, both Leo and geo are inevitability going to suffer more than a well covered elliptical
Destroying the planet? And geosync doesn’t work period. What could have been done is the money that was given to the telecoms actually be used to run fiber to everyone that they promised…
Geosync has been working for decades. Try again.
You can’t reach everywhere with fibre. Some areas of the far north are too remote and too sparsely populated for it to ever make sense to put in fibre, and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future.
This deal provides critical infrastructure to those places while not binding us to the whims of an egotistical fascist asshole.
This is where I am. If he just stepped back and followed the laws for whichever region he was providing service in, I wouldn’t have a problem with it being provided by an egotistic asshole. But he has done other than that a number of times, and that’s a problem. All this ignores the national security issues, which people should have gotten a refresher on during COVID with the N95 mask issues.
Sometimes the more expensive option just makes sense if national security is a factor.
Norway saunters into the chat, shakes its head over this ignorant drivel, and walks back out while tapping it’s temple with a forefinger
Norway has a population of around 5 million in an area the size of 385 thousand sq km. As of the 2021 census, the territories have a combined population of around 117 thousand people in an area just under 3.6 million sq km.
The difference of scale there is massive. Kudos to Norway if they’ve done a good job extending their fibre networks, but I sincerely doubt we’ll be able to achieve anywhere near the same level of penetration in the most environmentally harsh and most rural areas of our country with just fibre technologies.
Norway has one of the most aggressively traversing-hostile geographies on the planet. It has 1,200 fjords compared to about 240 for Canada. Plus, their mountains are far steeper and more impassable, and the fjords are deeper.
If Norway can run dedicated fibre optic to every hamlet over 500 people there, Canada can run fibre optic to any hamlet anywhere in our country for half the price.
I’m pretty sure you’re conflating the American situation with the Canadian one. America gave various telecoms about $4 billion to expand their networks, with which they did nothing. Canada did other stupid things, such as put a program in place to increase rural broadband in 2019, which is really late to the game, or, in Manitoba, where I live, just give a fiber network laid by a government-owned utility to a local ISP.
Research Xplore-net and circle back to this. The feds poured all kinds of subsidies into this shitty company and it’s never been more than a joke among anyone who’s ever had to use it. ETA look up hundreds (and thousands that didn’t post to the internet) cases like this one where Xplore-net users bailed en masse for Starlink as soon as possible and got fucked around for months with their cancellation and billing workflows.
I can’t find it but I’m reasonably sure I remember Xplore-net asking for a bailout or subsidy funding due to their customers fleeing around lockdowns. I’ll post it if I can find it.
ETA #2 lol Canadian Broadband Firm Xplore In Talks to Receive Fresh Financing
Naa we gave nearly a trillion to the telcoms. The point stands that while musk is a piece of shit, he did something that govs and other private companies didn’t.