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…
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.
Half the price of per kilometer
But many many more kilometers
Have you seen the North it’s hostile and very big. Not to mention the muskeg.
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.
Because for some reason America likes private companies doing everything now. They are so dependent on Musk one single citizen it’s ridiculous, and a national security threat.
We’ve been in that loop for a while. The problem is our gov isn’t exactly great at providing shit for the citizens because it’s filled with the same people who run the private industries. Which in turn just makes people less trusting of our gov. It’s a shit cycle
Geosync has been working for decades. Try again.
Geosync does not work for anything other than we browsing were latency doesn’t matter. You can’t use it to work from home and its not technically broadband…so try again.
Nobody claimed it’s broadband. And nobody claimed they need broadband up there. Nobody is trying to remote into their tech job from the Arctic Circle.
Take your straw men home.
The fuck are you talking about…rural Canada is not the fucking artic circle…jesus you’re dense, do you think people who live there don’t deserve proper Internet? Do you think people who live there can’t be tech workers or people who would remote into a job?
Remote tech workers aren’t living in a place without broadband, and I seriously doubt they’re moving to villages so remote they get supply planes, as weather allows. And yes the area includes the Arctic Circle. Remote workers are living in a medium sized town with a fiber backbone connection because their job already depends on it. They aren’t pining away at Cambridge Bay wishing someone would give them broadband internet.
Large areas of the world are fine without broadband internet. Especially when the method of delivery is to smother LEO with disposable satellites. Trying to extend the western standard of living to every corner of the world instead of ameliorating the standard is a major driver of climate change. Some things just don’t work in remote areas.
I’ll repaste the same here since you and another basically said the same thing “fuck poor people and rural people and minorities” right?
Lol what a joke, so you’re saying people in rural areas don’t deserve Internet lol fuck those kids who want to learn, and fuck those people who live out there and don’t have the means to live in an expensive city, they should enjoy their shitty connections or no connections at all.
You’re hilarious
Geosync Satellite Internet works fine for learning, they still have school and libraries. Geosync has worked for decades, so the question isn’t should we screw them over. It’s should we upgrade, given the price?
There’s plenty of other ways to bring services to these very remote areas and raise their standard of living. Just because one thing is held back does not mean nobody cares about them. It means we’re being responsible with our resources and environment.
And it’s especially important to question these things whenever people start talking about, “for the kids!”
Cambridge bay might be a bad example the research facility is there so imagine that has high speed internet.
You’d be surprised. Sometimes it’s better to just clone and send the hard drive. There’s always the old half joke about the bandwidth of a station wagon moving a bunch of drives down the interstate.
Ehrm, no to both questions? You live in rural fucking Canada. Connectivity will be shit, that’s a given. If you choose a job that relies on that, you should move to where you can actually work.
Fast internet is a privilege, not something people “deserve”. Fucking up LEO so people can stream or Netflix or whatever is absolutely not worth it, and imo the practice should be banned. Starlink has been disastrous for astronomy already. Put fiber in if it’s so important, expensive but hey, people “deserve” it right?
Lol what a joke, so you’re saying people in rural areas don’t deserve Internet lol fuck those kids who want to learn, and fuck those people who live out there and don’t have the means to live in an expensive city lol
You’re hilarious
Not living in an expensive city doesn’t equate to living in extremely remote areas. If you choose to live in an area with very few services, then don’t expect the rest of the world to bend over backwards to provide those for you at their expense. The sheer entitlement is hilarious.
Besides, there’s still internet, just not fast broadband.
He’s switched from remote workers to kids. He’s just trying to gin up outrage now.
Yes. Burning debris in the upper atmosphere has unknown effets on the environment, plus the exploitation of rare earth metal that cannot be recycled and the energy expenditure. Musk want to burn more satellites per year than what we ever launched prior to this, and every other greedy company wants to follow suit with their own junk.
Man, just wait until you find out about naturally occurring meteors… They’re loaded with metal and are vaporized in the upper atmosphere 24x7x365… and have been doing so for pretty much all of the 4 billion years the planet has been around.
The paper someone links to, shows that meteoroids already dump more than 11.7k metric tons into the atmosphere every year. We know what effects it has.