Canadians urge CRTC to approve Musk’s plan
Tesla CEO wants to bring super-fast internet service to rural areas via satellite
For Thomas Fiema, the simple experience of going online falls somewhere between a crapshoot and pulling teeth.
Fiema, who works in IT, lives in a relatively isolated house outside Milton, Ont., with his wife, four kids and two in-laws. The only home internet service available to them is DSL, or a digital subscriber line — an older access technology that runs across aging copper phone wires.
While many internet users in big cities are now surfing on super-fast fibreoptic networks at speeds of 100 megabits per second or more, Fiema and his family max out at a measly 2.5 Mbps. Netflix, for reference’s sake, recommends at least three Mbps for standard definition video streaming and five Mbps for high definition. The connection is so slow that household members have to schedule when they want to be online to avoid using it at the same time. Even still, it often drops entirely.
So, when billionaire entrepreneur and Tesla electric car impresario Elon Musk recently signalled to telecommunications regulators that he intends to provide superfast internet service to rural Canadians via satellite, Fiema could hardly contain his excitement.
“It just seems like a godsend,” he says. “This is perfect, there’s no way I can’t support it.”
Musk’s application with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, lodged in May via his Hawthorne, Calif.-based company Space Exploration Technologies, has mustered an unusual groundswell of public support.
As of publication time, more than 2,100 Canadians — including Fiema — have written to the CRTC to urge its approval for what is known as a Basic International Telecommunications Service licence.
The regulator has extended the public comment deadline to this Friday to accommodate the high level of interest.
Such large write-in campaigns are often driven by the involved companies themselves, but that does not appear to be the case in this situation. A number of people contacted by the Star who have submitted comments to the regulator say they have been following SpaceX’s plans closely through discussions on Reddit, Facebook and others.
Musk has said that SpaceX, through its subsidiary Starlink, will be able to provide download speeds of up to a gigabit per second, or 1,000 Mbps, by using low-earth orbit satellites. LEO satellites operate at between 500 and 2,000 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, or much lower than traditional geostationary counterparts at 36,000 kilometres.
Aside from higher speeds, proponents say LEO satellites can also deliver considerably lower latency, or the time it takes for data to make a round trip between connection points. While geostationary latency is typically 500 milliseconds or higher, Starlink is promising between 15 and 25 milliseconds — an important threshold for real-time applications such as phone or video chats and online gaming.
Starlink’s ambitious speed and latency goals have yet to be proven in large-scale, realworld conditions. To that end, the company is planning a beta test this summer or fall.
Its aim is to then launch the service fully in the northern United States and Canada before the end of this year, with plans for near-global expansion by 2021. The firm now has 540 LEO satellites in orbit, including 58 launched on June 13 by SpaceX, the company Musk started in 2002 in an effort to make space transportation cheaper.
The company has not yet announced pricing, but analysts have estimated the service might cost around $80 (U.S.) per month.
Starlink would face competition in Canada from Woodstock, Ont.-based Xplornet, which currently provides internet and phone service through geostationary satellites. Xplornet doesn’t yet have plans to add LEO capability, but the company last year signed a deal to use U.S.-based Hughes Network Systems’ next-generation geostationary Jupiter 3 Ultra High Density Satellite to provide download speeds up to 100 Mbps, with an expected launch in 2021.
Ottawa-based Telesat is also in the process of launching an LEO network that it will then offer on a wholesale basis to internet providers such as Xplornet. The government of Canada last year announced a $600 million contribution to the effort, which the company expects will become available in Canada in 2022.
Samer Bishay, chief executive of Toronto-based phone provider Iristel, says it’s more the large telecom companies such as Bell and Rogers that need to be concerned about Musk — who holds Canadian, U.S. and South African citizenships — and his move into internet access services.
While Starlink is currently targeting only rural internet customers, the company is likely to provide home phone service over its network, he says. LEO technology could also soon prove to be competitive with fibre and cellular wireless connectivity.
“Is it going to change the landscape? Yeah, potentially,” says Bishay, a former systems engineer at the Canadian Space Agency. “Who says that10 years from now, your cellphone can’t communicate directly with a satellite, so maybe you start switching providers?”