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.
“$2.14 billion for a local company?! why don’t we just have a foreign billionaire do it for $2.09 billion and then another $1 billion when he fucks it up?”
It’s an easy reaction to have when you only read the headline. But if you do the math, Starlink already provides service to most of the north at less than $200/mo per person. There are less than 120k people in the northern territories. That 2.2bn works out to something like 85 years of Starlink service per person in the north (assuming everyone there needs an individual dish, which isn’t the case). Myself and a couple of other commentors have done some looking into Telesat as a company and they launched one (1) LEO “test sat” in 2018 and haven’t done a fucking thing since to get northern people online in a timely fashion.
If you actually talk to people who live in the north most of them who can afford to already have Starlink, because it works far better than Xplore which was the only option previously, for many years. Most northern mining, logging, and oil camps are also getting their workers online with Starlink and have been for a few years already.
I’ve not a fan of Elon, or the canadian libs, or the conservative party. But this whole discussion is kinda bullshit. As far as I’m concerned Elon Musk is guillotine lube, top of the list. The day after he is beheaded, Starlink as a company will continue operating. Which, frankly, is best-case scenario. idk what else to say about that.
What’s up with his purple arm?
Bro needs a doctor lmao
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.
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.
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.
I mean, moving beyond the loan part, (not a grant, meaning that we will get the money back), is this not what the Canadian population wants? The govt investing money to provide alternative options to the big 3 for internet?
Call me jaded, but I imagine they’ll get bought up in 5-10 by Robellus, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Beyond that, do we really want our critical infrastructure tied to a company with such a shoddy and unpredictable “face man”?
I want a public fibre network, not for-profit space junk.
Well you’re not going to get a fibre network, public or private, in the far north. Not happening.
Massive towers and directional dishes is probably a better approach than LEO satellites though
This is exactly what we want. Fuck the conservatives and Musk.
Also the cost of starlink is well known, I looked into it and found it to not be affordable for our situation myself and decided against it. It’s a few hundred for the equipment itself and then I believe at the time it was around $140 a month.
You can buy used dishes online for as little as 100 bucks and get the account transferred over to your name. Source; bought a dish for less than 100 bucks and got it transferred to my account. You don’t have to pay full price for the equipment. And I don’t know where you live but even in a major city you’re paying roughly 120/mo for decent broadband internet. If you’re doing a budget plan you can get it for half that, if you want fuckin 1.5mbps upload speeds lmfao.
I live within 20 kilometers of a major city. My options for high-speed were 5/1 DSL for $75 or Starlink, with the costs you described. I suppose 5 megabits would be enough if I limited myself to non-streaming services or only one person using those services at a time, but anyone who thinks that was a reasonable alternative in 2023 probably isn’t participating in the modern technological world, either.
Sure on the surface going with Elon’s plan may be less costly. But like a deal with the devil, you realize the cost is more than money.
The cost is Elon deciding when his system will actually work for customers
The cost is Elon flouting laws and courts as it suits him
The cost is Elon considering himself above all laws internationally
He is going to put himself over Canadians every single time if we allow ourselves to rely on him. Sure you can have a contract that says keep the price fixed or whatever, but Elon will need to be dragged kicking and screaming to enforce anything.
Conservatives only deal with what’s on the surface so everything past your first sentence will mean nothing to them.
Of course the conservatives want that unreliable tempered man in charge of our communications where new customers got unexpectedly charged a $100 fee.
Pray he does not alter the deal any further
PP wants to hand Canada over to Musk and the deranged US far right.
They want to force us onto post media, loblaws, bell, rogers, twitter and starlink.
Unfortunately this is where Musk figured out how to corner the market ahead of time. It was the same thing when cellular tech came into the mainstream. Lots of less developed countries with poor or no hardwired telcom infra found that skipping ahead to next-gen tech (cell towers) was super cheap and quick to build, so lots of corners of the earth found themselves connected in the 90’s that had never been prior to that decade.
Starlink and low-orbit sats for internet coverage are a similar leap ahead in cost and speed to deploy. Elon and his goons saw it coming long before anyone else did, and the fact they also have Space X was a pretty key part of their speed to deploy.
I’m no Elon stan, I hate the fucking guy. But it is what it is. He got there first and people in northern canada can already access Starlink for under 200/mo. I am no math guy but I suspect that even if the fed gov paid every cent of everyone’s subscription to Starlink it wouldn’t amount to 2 billion dollars. 🤷
EDIT just did some napkin math. With the help of wiki found that the population of northern canada is less than 120k people. So cost of taxpayers footing the bill for everyone up there to be on Starlink would be 24 million/yr. Or… for that same 2 billion, 83 years of Starlink subscriptions for each and every person up there. That would be if each single person had their own dish.
The problem occurs in 2030 when Elon decides that only Russian settlers in the North can get satellite Internet because the Canadians might use it offensively in their war, against Russian settlers in Canada.
This is an interesting scenario with the entire military might of the US sitting in Alaska at this moment literally there to prevent this exact thing from happening. I mean, fun to think about, but not happening any time soon. Especially by the year 2030.
Telesat is a Canadian company. The benefit extends beyond just the satellite internet service. We get a domestic provider of this service so we don’t have to rely on Elon and his ketamine delusions and ties to Russia. This will also create Canadian jobs and boost our economy.
I just looked into Telesat for the first time, and I’m happy if they actually do anything they say they’re gonna. I found that the canadian gov’t already injected 1.3bn into them in 2021. Further reading on their own website shows they only have one (1) “demo” sat in LEO launched in 2018, for “testing purposes”. So we’re now giving them another 2.2bn for what exactly? If this project turns out like some of the other semi-publicly funded or subsidized attempts at connecting northern canada it’s never going to happen, or like in the case of XPlore-Net turn out to be the shittiest overpriced attempt at internet providers ever to have existed. Tens of thousands of their customers bought a Starlink as soon as it became available to them, several years ago already.
I’ve traveled the north and I know a handful of people who grew up there literally on trap lines and in one case a fishing village in the northern section of Nunavut. I really am for everyone in Canada getting online. I’d like to have seen it happen a long time ago. I just don’t have a lot of faith in these publicly funded projects given their track record. And to be clear, I loathe the liberals as much as the conservatives, I’m not choosing a political side here. To put this another way, 3.3bn would go a long way towards building out the clean water infra that the gov’t has also been promising for decades. idfk call me crazy but there isn’t already a successful company going around offering that service for very cheap. Maybe we should be investing in areas where there’s not already a solution.
Your Telesat review is very biased. I didn’t know who they were until today, but they’ve been operating geo satellites for 60 years. They also don’t manufacture satellites, so their track record will have less bearing on how those satellites are made. Also, it says in the current article that the previous $1.3 billion deal didn’t go through. I tried to find more info, but the closest I got was Telesat’s press release that mentioned it being subject to various conditions, which may not have been met. That actually increases my confidence, since before they were going to just give them some money if certain conditions were met, and not they’re just getting a loan. Now, whether they actually pay it back… I’d be unsurprised to learn that part of their preparation for this was going public in 2021.
I’d be a little concerned about the manufacturer, MDA, who has gone through a number of mergers and spin-offs over the decades. I’m not certain, but it’s possible that Telesat and MDA had divisions that were spun off into each other at one point. They could have a strong core, or it could have all been sold off and the key people moved on. The fact they still have the Canadarm team and were selected for the first phase of Canadarm 3 gives a little hope, but has no bearing on their capability to manufacture the satellites needed for this array. That said, they do have some history with the antennas and such required for this project.
In short, neither of the key players in this satellite project are new entries, and in fact have had many successful projects over decades. Hopefully this project takes them to new heights.
Not sure how it’s biased, the piece about the 1.3bn was within the first five results that came up when I searched them. To be fair, I didn’t dig as deep as you did to find that that deal didn’t go through. Thanks for the correction, I didn’t know that. The gov-can website itself still has details about the deal, not sure why they wouldn’t have removed it if it didn’t happen. For context this is the article on canada.ca I was referring to (I wasn’t trying to be shady and I don’t appreciate being accused of that).
I don’t have a horse in this race. I personally don’t give a fuck about how the north gets connected per se as long as billions of public money isn’t wasted. Again, imo clean water infra is probably a lot more important in the long run for the people in the north considering there is already at least one viable service to connect to the internet with. I can’t quite wrap my head around why Telesat hasn’t left the “testing phase” in 6+ years. Your added context here makes me even more wary given the details about the company that would actually be manufacturing the LEO sats (and obviously… haven’t done so yet. Why is that?).
We all know why canadian cell and internet prices are among the highest in the world. It’s because our entire population is less than that which occupies the lower third of california. It costs a lot to build infrastructure to provide comms tech for each person per capita on this scale considering 95+ percent of our population lives along the US border. My point is that Starlink already has the infra in the northern sky, mostly because they have a pretty sizeable market in Alaska and the knock-off effect is there are already LEO sats within range of providing lots of northern canadian residents that same service. The rhetoric about national security is laughable given anyone with a debit card anywhere in the country can already order Starlink and have it delivered within the week. If you’re gonna go down that rabbit hole, let’s ban it across the country in favor of a domestic solution that might be available in another decade at the current rate of development. While we’re at it, let’s make it so that those fly-in communities in the north are only allowed to get food and supply deliveries on canadian-made airplanes and boats.
It all starts to break down when you think about it. This isn’t a political thing for me, it’s practical. I’m not a huge fan of government in any form (read my comment history). But since we’re all participating in this fucking shitshow let’s look at the facts and spend our collective tax money wisely. If that 2.2bn is actually going to mean most people in the north get cheap or free internet within the next decade I’d love to see it. Meanwhile, unfortunately, Starlink is already in place and working for that purpose. That’s just a fact, whether anyone likes Elon Musk or not. I fuckin don’t.
Except that Starlink pricing and throughput is not linear. They’re starting to add congestion charges in popular areas, they have no satellites at higher latitudes, and their devices suffer at low temperatures. If you think that Starlink will be able to deliver what Elmo claims, then I have a trip to the Titanic to sell to you.
Again, I’m no Elon stan. You don’t have to convince me he’s a dbag, and I wish some other competitor would come along with something better. However I’ve personally used Starlink in sub -30C temps for work, for weeks at a time. The dishes work perfectly fine in cold climates, and they have a self-heating element to de-ice themselves if you enable that feature. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I do know lots of other people who also rely on it in similar climates.
You can go onto Starlink’s coverage map right now and order service to Dawson City Yukon, and anywhere equilateral to that point. There’s a pretty big market for it in Alaska, already. The tech does what it says it does, which kinda sucks because I’d rather not put money into his fucking bank account. But yeah. It is what it is.
Starlink and low-orbit sats for internet coverage are a similar leap ahead in cost and speed to deploy. Elon and his goons saw it coming long before anyone else did, and the fact they also have Space X was a pretty key part of their speed to deploy.
Starlink was SpaceXs solution to having a reusable first stage rocket and not enough demand for all the flights they could now do.
They basically poured billions into perfecting reuse, and had to find a way to make money on the new but upfront costly capabilities so they came up with starlink.
Edit: it also gave them a safer way to more easily test flight proven rockets with what was at the time more weary customers of the tech. For awhile NASA still wanted new rockets, but then became fine with flight proven as all the extra flights showed it was okay.
