Not sure of your knowledge of the Canadian Telecom market but in certain urban centers there's virtually no competition (or if there is competition its borderline collusion between our three major carriers). I know a lot of people wishing for competitive options to disconnect themselves from Rogers/Bell/Telus and would see this as something compelling.
not sure about collusion between the big 3, but for both my mobile and internet provider (2 different ones), i've successfully pitted them against each other by calling to say i'm switching over to their competitor and repeatedly got discounts for it. i'm currently paying $45/mth for 20gb from Fido Pulse BYOD plan with unlimited talk and text, and for home internet i'm paying $55/mth for 750mbps fibre from Telus.
13gb for $67? What the hell. I thought I had a great plan at 6 gbs for $55. I remember everyone getting the 10gb for $60 deal a while back but I missed out on that one.
That's $67 before taxes. I'm with Virgin (not a recommendation). They tend to call every 6 months (less lately) and ask if I'm happy. I always say it costs too much and I want more data. They gave me two bonus packages (something like $5 for 1GB or 2GB). That's how I got to relatively cheap 13GB.
Nowadays they just look at other plans and say, nope, you're on something better than anything we offer now.
FWIW Fizz is the new hotness here. They have worse coverage outside of metros, cheaper base plans, zero phone customer service (problem for negotiating cheaper deals I imagine), and rollover data, which Virgin does not.
this is in BC. every 3-4 months, i keep calling, ask for "customer retention department" and threaten to leave. sometimes i just say "got any promos for me?" and they'll just offer whatever they can. sometimes if they have an attitude, i just hang up and call back for another more friendly agent. i've done this for the past 2 yrs and always ends up with at least a new $5/mth discount added to my bill, so by now my bill is super low.
It's a little more nuanced. Yes Bell and Rogers have a duopoly but they are also required to sell network access at a regulated wholesale rate to other ISPs (Teksavvy, start.ca, etc as Ontario examples). It's kind of a weird setup, but you can read more about it here.
https://www.google.com/search?q=The+CRTC+requires+telephone+....
Quote:
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The CRTC requires telephone and cable companies to sell access to their networks to independent Internet service providers (ISPs) at regulated wholesale prices.
>I know a lot of people wishing for competitive options to disconnect themselves from Rogers/Bell/Telus and would see this as something compelling.
They wouldn't when they realise that it is a cheaper alternative to existing satellite internet services, not cable internet. Also that it would have reception issues in urban and suburban areas which is why they are targeting rural areas.
>Why will non remote Canadians get excited about high speed internet? They already have that.
They do? I live in northern New England an hour so from the border and have some Canadian friends who complain that they have at best the same sort of mediocre 5-10/1-2 ADSL I did up until a year or two ago when fiber became available. They refer to their phone company as "the Jolly Roger" with all said connotations. Looking at this Canadian National Broadband Internet Service Availability Map seems to back that up too:
Looks like even 50/10 let alone anything better has pretty minimal penetration, with a lot on really mediocre speeds providing wider areas. Even before sat<>sat optical, Starlink has potential to do a lot better for a lot more people. And once density gets good enough with sat<>sat links, Starlink may flat out offer better latency to remote parts of the world then existing connections thanks to the 40% speed benefit of c in a vaccum/air vs non-photonic bandgap fiber and a more point-to-point topology. That won't matter to everyone but it may be very valuable to certain remote workers.
> They do? I live in northern New England an hour so from the border and have some Canadian friends who complain that they have at best the same sort of mediocre 5-10/1-2 ADSL I did up until a year or two ago
People are often better at complaining than at remedying their situation.
Some years ago now I was at a friend's flat. He lamented that ASDL was poor. "They'll never offer anything better here" he said. I thought that was odd because I thought I'd seen a cabinet for his section of the district where we both live. So I suggested he check. He waved me off, no need to bother right because he's sure it isn't an option. So I typed his address into the checker and it said he could buy 80Mbps vDSL.
As a result of course he has 80Mbps vDSL. Now, if I'd just agreed "Yeah, it sucks" how long do you think he would have taken to realise he could buy faster service? A year? Five years? Maybe he'd still be moaning now on our Friday Jitsi call instead of complaining that the terrible webcam setup he cobbled together back in late March sucks?
But it's legitimately bad in a lot of places. My dad's house is on the coast near Acadia National Park and within about 10 minutes of what passes for a city in those parts. He's the last house on a road off the main road that gets broadband at all and it's ADSL that gets about 1Mbit down. You can't really do video. Houses further along the road need to do satellite or try their luck with pretty much equally mediocre cellular.
And people have investigated because basically not having internet is something of a pain but it is what it is.
This is kind of a weird response, do you disagree with that coverage map or something? I don't know about your friend, but it's not unreasonable to give technical people on HN a little more credit then that. I kept thoroughly abreast of every possible broadband option even in my area and I know they do too. "A friend's flat" doesn't sound like a semi-rural or rural zone, where as simple geography you can be miles away from even the nearest village. DSL falls off pretty hard with distance, when you're at 15000+ feet/5000+ meters there isn't much to be done, even with bonded lines (if that's even an option). Nearest cable TV service to me is about 3.5 miles off and has been that way for 20 years now at least. Various WISP efforts have added new possibilities in the last 5 years, but mountainous regions still result in very hit/miss service and since many of them are quite ad hoc and local performance is also hit/miss (though they're often a lot of fun to actually deal with, good technical enthusiastic people you can have a real conversation with and come up with creative solutions with like the old days). It's a real miracle that fiber came through here via our great local ISP, though another few houses/mile away and I'd have missed it. And now everything is on hold again due to lock down.
Starlink definitely will be able to at least smooth out the current total patchwork. The question will just be if it's a low density area and (while constellation is building and before optical interlink sats) if it's in a covered zone. Won't always be the best option I'm sure, but it won't be the case that two people a mere half mile away as the crow flies with a small hill between them have to deal with total feast/famine differences.
You can't always trust the online address checker. In this case it was likely right, but CenturyLink's checker for our address has never been right. For a while it said far higher than what the tech said we could get, and now it shows lower than what we actually have.
> "Why will non remote Canadians get excited about high speed internet?"
I know Canada is a huge, sparsely populated country with many isolated, remote communities. But I'm astounded that "30 kilometres north of Toronto" is considered one of those locations so remote that you can't get fast, affordable internet service. So it seems like there are potentially a lot of "remote" Canadians.
People may misinterpret what 'remote' means and just how bad the internet situation is. My father lives 45 minutes away from Toronto and until he spent a ton of money on a line-of-sight antenna a year ago, he basically had dial-up internet.
Starlink is saying they're shooting for below 20ms but there's been no verification of that... not clear if Starlink has even hit that target yet. They're pretty tight lipped about everything a this point.
Musk companies are working like agile software teams, except with hardware. I'm excepting that they actually launched the satellite before being able to make them work.
Yeah even their 20ms number, the first I saw of it was when they applied for some government money, it's possible that number didn't exist until someone saw the requirement on the paperwork ;)
>"I live in rural Ontario where there are no providers that can provide internet at a fast and affordable price," said Mahdi Hossinzehi, a resident of Cedar Valley, Ont., about 30 kilometres north of Toronto. "With fast, reliable and affordable internet, rural areas will benefit immensely economically, and a lot of younger people won't end up leaving for the city."
>Carol Jobity of Adjala-Tosorontio, just west of Barrie, Ont., is similarly supportive.
>"Please approve this," Jobity wrote to the regulator. "We're in support 100 per cent."
>Iqaluit resident Brandt Chu said he's in favour of the proposal because of how remote life can be in Nunavut.
I find it a bit amusing that 2/3 of the people complaining live in municipalities within commuting distance of Toronto. Surely CBC could have found comments from more than one Canadian who actually lives in a remote rural area, Barrie and Cedar Valley do not count. Those two areas would be better served by a wireless ISP, unlike truly remote areas which make up large swaths of the province.
Internet deserts can change drastically from block to block.
It's not an environmental thing that gets transferred by geography so comparing the commute distance doesn't make sense. More accurate correlation would be household income in the neighborhoods there is lack of Internet.
From your name you live in LA. I live in and know the area I am talking about. Thanks for the suggestion.
As for household income proximity to Toronto is an indicator of wealth in itself.
I don't mean this in a belittling way, but if you are from California your concept of 'remote' is vastly different to ours in Ontario, where we have less than half the population in ~2.5x the landmass, and that population is mostly in the Toronto area. Now imagine what 'remote' must mean in the less populated provinces and territories (Ontario is the most populated province).
Just commenting again to try and make it up to all the people who buried my other reply. Let me go a bit more in depth.
> It's not an environmental thing that gets transferred by geography so comparing the commute distance doesn't make sense.
Proximity to Canada's economic and telecommunications hub (Toronto) does in fact influence access to the Internet.
>More accurate correlation would be household income in the neighborhoods there is lack of Internet.
There is access to the Internet in the two communities I mentioned, which is why I brought it up in the first place. The access isn't as good as downtown Toronto or some areas in the suburbs, but in comparison to actual remote areas it is fantastic.
My entire point in the comment that you replied to is mentioning Barrie and Cedar Valley in the same breath as Iqaluit, a place so remote even access to basic foods is expensive, is absurd.
I know you don't know where any of these places are.
Counter point: Georgetown ON has great internet, Halton Hills, not so much. And it’s a 10 minute drive from Mississauga...
So it’s easy on a rural road even near a big city to have very, very few options if the cable company didn’t bother to run a wire down your particular street.
I imagine we’ll hear fewer stories like this within 5 years now, but it’s been a long time coming — even if you have LTE service, it’s not cheap enough for data-hungry TVs and PCs.
There are less options than the city in Halton Hills for sure but they still have access to LTE, DSL and sometimes cable.
My point isn't that these areas are fine and don't need better service, my point is they should not be compared to truly remote areas without even basic cell service (there are a lot of these if you drive north about 6 hours).
Getting annoying that people are trying to rebut a claim I didn't make when all I'm doing is bitching about the CBC in keeping with Canadian tradition.
Depends on the wireless ISP. Speaking generally, a wireless ISP has the potential to provide much better service at a much lower price. As compared to current satellite internet providers it is exponentially better, as compared to Starlink... who knows, we'll see when they release concrete information.
A fixed wireless ISP can be as fast and stable as a fiber connection or as slow as a 90s-era DSL ISP. The main problem is scaling - as you add customers, you have more users competing for a limited spectrum. To accommodate this, you have to use TDMA and other multiplexing strategies which reduce throughput and increase latency.
It's been a long time since I had to use satellite, but I'd happily take even the most oversubscribed WISP out there over satellite internet.
The remote areas you refer to are a small fraction of the population compared to the GTA (greater Toronto area.) Should a highly visible revenue-oriented corporation really aim to improve connectivity out in the boonies?
It'll also function just fine on your roof - the issue with population density is just that bandwidth is limited per area, and so there's much lower bandwidth per person in metro areas.
> Should a highly visible revenue-oriented corporation really aim to improve connectivity out in the boonies?
The target market for Starlink -- according to Musk -- is "the 3% to 4% of the population who are hardest to reach through terrestrial networks".
So yes, "the boonies" are the market. Almost no one reading this is in that market.
It seems self evident to me that the intended customers can't be urban, suburban or even exurban residences; the satellites won't be able to serve a large population of closely spaced transceivers.
Sure, if the service is likely to be most effective in areas with low population density, there is little competition for those customers, there is little marginal cost associated with making their service available to rural customers, and serving rural customers does not preclude them from serving urban customers as well.
Kanata isn't even a city, it has a population of 90,000. Where did you hear it was the 'Silicon Valley of Canada'? All your Internet traffic routes through the Toronto Internet Exchange.
I'll be interested to see how SpaceX tries to get the word out to rural Canadians once it launches. None of Elon's current companies have had to do any traditional marketing yet, but I suspect that they'll have to for this.
You can still reach them with internet marketing, people who live in rural Canada still use social media. In many rural areas there will be kind of a catch all local business that springs up and resells cable, dsl, dialup, landline, cell or whatever services are available in the community (along with offering computer and phone repair or whatever). If it were me I would reach out to these people and let them do their own local marketing, in addition to the normal Elon strategy.
That would be so wonderful, it is stupid how things are run currently and it so expensive for no good reason. I wish we had nationalized the internet providers a while ago. That would have allowed us to just write in the law that everybody should have access to the internet. Pretty much like electricity is run in Quebec. It works great, it's cheap and the government even makes money.
They were very fan of it when electricity prices were low and someone had to pay the enormous costs (~6.5B$ 2020 dollars) of construction with no guarantee of benefits:
"At the time BRINCO was praised for having built the station with no public money from Newfoundland, while Hydro-Québec assumed nearly all the financial risk. It is unlikely that BRINCO would have found other investors willing to take on that risk.[11] In 1981 it made a good return on the investment at almost no risk.[6]"
> I wish we had nationalized the internet providers a while ago
I don't want to see the actual ISPs become government-run, just the local fiber between users and the nearest meet-me room. Let people have a choice of who lights up that fiber, and what bandwidth and services they want, but make it possible for anyone to compete without trenching their own fiber. (And, closely related, make sure every new development has not just conduit but fiber through that conduit for every home.)
Here in DC, the public labor unions forced the government to rehire subway inspectors who had gotten fired for falsifying inspection logs. (Public police systems in the U.S. face the same exact problem, except with far deadlier consequences.)
Sorry, but an anecdote of the government failing to do something is no more an argument it won't work than an anecdote of a company failing to do something is an argument that won't work. Especially in light of the OP's existence proof. (You only have to succeed once to prove that it can be done, but any line of failures proves nothing more than that success isn't guaranteed...)
Two case studies of the two busiest subway systems in the country (subways being an instance of public infrastructure that we have). Do you want to talk about the public water infrastructure that’s poisoning kids with lead, or the public sewer infrastructure that’s poisoning our rivers?
Imagine you're standing in a flat field, facing the satellite. Degrees from the horizon is how far you would have to bend your neck to be looking straight at the satellite.
FCC filings suggest 25 is the absolute minimum for service, the final constellation is likely to use somewhere in 40-60 as the actual limit.
I've received this question a few times now, anyone have a better name? Or maybe I should just add a ? button with a diagram?
The planet is definitely in the way of radio transmissions between you and a satellite "below the horizon" and even if it could pass through the planet that's a long way. On the other hand a satellite in a boring orbit that's directly above you is 90° from the horizon with no obstacles and as close as it'll ever be so your reception ought to be good.
An optimist might believe Starlink will work at 10° above the horizon. A pessimist might doubt anybody will get it working below 80° (ie almost directly overhead). The reality is likely to be in between and this UI lets you see the effect.
"Optimism" and "pessimism" don't really apply here. While SpaceX hasn't publicly committed to what the "operational" value will be, it's likely they had a very good idea before they flew any hardware.
SpaceX is still developing the user terminal, there might be a bit of optimism/pessimism in the degree to which they'll be able to make the user terminal target different angles (without bloating costs), though the person you're replying to definitely exaggerated the extent.
> NORAD maintains general perturbation element sets on all resident space objects. These element sets are periodically refined so as to maintain a reasonable prediction capability on all space objects. In turn, these element sets are provided to users. The purpose of this report is to provide the user with a means of propagating these element sets in time to obtain a position and velocity of the space object. [1]
For the curious, here is the wikipedia page [2] with details on the US Space Surveillance Network used to obtain this data (30+ ground-based radars and optical telescopes worldwide, plus 6 satellites in orbit).
I grabbed a set of TLEs from celestrak (which I'm serving from my site), and then I propagate them forward with satellite-js [1] to the current date 6 times a second.
Very cool visualization, but am I seeing correctly that Starlink only covers the southern half of Canada? I guess that would still mean a lot of potential users, but also most of the major cities, which are already wired up?
This is true, but practically no one lives in the northern half so no one cares.
There's also a second stage that will cover the poles (they're required by the us government to get Alaska iirc), so eventually it will cover all of it.
> "practically no one lives in the northern half so no one cares."
I have friends who live in Iqaluit, Nunavut. It's a nice place to live with a cool community, but everything there is very expensive, including internet service. How about $399/month for 5 Mbps service, capped at 55 GB? And that's with the resident's discount! If Starlink were available here it would be an absolute game changer.
Seriously though, the population of Nunavut is roughly 40k. I guess that 90% of them are potential customers so maybe I shouldn't dismiss them too early, but you can see why I think SpaceX is right to consider them (and the other northern areas) lower priority.
The really dense strips would be coincidence (those are from recent launches, the satellites in them are slowly spreading apart until they look like all the other satellites). There is always a generally high concentration of satellites at the northern and southern end of the range as a result of orbital mechanics though.
I know it's an exaggeration, but it's exciting to think of some random bored person in a low-access area all of a sudden seeing a new access point in settings.
(Come to think of it, with the PSPS phenomenon here in NorCal, I might end up being that bored guy this very year!)
They haven't started with orbits specifically around Canada. It's probably just a matter of where it is easiest to go through the legal/political mess.
This is a global constellation. The initial orbital planes are arranged so that the density of satellites is maximized in middle latitudes, where most of the affluent world population lives.
With a LEO constellation, unlike GEO, you can not just serve a single area. That is why you have to go with a very big, worldwide system.
The orbit those are doing (a Molniya orbit) means they are looking down at Russia for many hours, then they zip around the far side of the globe quickly, then back to hanging over Russia.
Geostationary is cool, but it's very expensive, and lots of Russia is very far North for which Geostationary sucks anyway. So, do cheaper orbits with more birds, but with a very eccentric orbit and voila, you've solved the problem.
"[Pic of 12h orbit] Usually the period from perigee +2 hours to perigee +10 hours is used to transmit to the northern hemisphere."
"In practice, a satellite in a Molniya orbit serves the same purpose for high latitudes as a geostationary satellite does for equatorial regions, except that multiple satellites are required for continuous coverage."
A single great circle isn't a great way to model an orbit because it won't take into account the precession of the earth. It's a bit more accurate (but still not quite right) to say that that the constellation covers every single great circle with the same value of theta. In other words, it covers any part of the earth with equal or lower latitude.
However that's a bit of a simplification that ignores things like the need for ground stations, local laws (I will be astounded if they're allowed to broadcast over China), gaps in their orbital shells (such gaps probably don't actually exist, I haven't looked carefully at their orbits), local obstructions like mountains/valleys, etc
Satellites spend most of their time near their extrema in latitude, though, so that's why the current constellation offers northern US/Canada and not areas south of there.
You have to orbit around the center of gravity so these satellites won't just be over the arctic or anything. They have to orbit deep into the southern hemisphere to cover northern Canada so realistically there will probably global coverage at that point and this is just a pilot project of some sort.
I have ranted about the terrible quality of consumer telecommunications in Canada for years - I am terribly excited. I have lived in both the US and Canada, moving between both for the past 6 years, and I am always thrilled to use American providers.
Anecdotal data point: For a while, AT&T had an North-America wide plan for $~40/45 for month with 10G LTE with the rest being 3G. I kept this in Canada because there would be nothing close to this there - it was cheaper to use the American service.
I've always used my own phone with prepaid plans and the cheapest plans in Canada are awful compared to the cheapest plans in the USA. I also lived in the GTA, not some remote village.
Another Canuck here... I've been using a low cost data-less plan for years because I can't justify paying four+ times as much just for data when I'm away from wifi!
When I traveled in Africa several years ago I paid about $20 for a one month data plan (1GB IIRC) that included a usb dongle to connect to my laptop. In Canada the same service would have cost ~$100 at the time.
The duopoly in Canada ensures little will change unless it's mandated by legislation. Having Musk enter the fray is welcomed news.
Is your duopoly DSL (Bell, Telus, SaskTel, TekSavvy^) and Cable (Shaw, Rogers, Cogeco, Videotron, TekSavvy^)? Or some subset of the mobile (Telus, Rogers, Bell, Shaw/Freedom, Fido^, Chatr^, Koodo^, Virgin^, 7-11^, PC^, PetroCanada^) providers? Either way, this is a bit disingenuous. Totally agree we pay too much, but 6GB with a $1G phone subsidy for $70cad (52usd) is competitive.
Yes we get hosed on roaming (even you Rogers). But, it turns out a local sim is inexpensive, unlocking is guaranteed free even even under that contract (for more than a year now)
It was terrible, it's currently improving. It doesn't compare to a £15 sim in London with 15GB of data and unlimited chat/text in 2017. Nor do the plans for Canada's shorts[0]
In reply to an inquiry about rural broadband, one of SpaceX's sales engineers told the Nebraska state government about a year ago:
"Service levels of 100 Mbps down / 40 Mbps up would generally be anticipated, but depends on
how dense the user-base is within a region. Latency will be very low, ~30 ms or so, far quicker than existing satellite-based solutions due to our much lower orbit, and comparable to fiber. User segment is a 19-inch electronically steered antenna, mounted on one’s rooftop."
And a more recent test by the Air Force measured 610 Mbps with an aircraft in flight, though of course there was very little contention to worry about.
I'm sure they will find a way to cut the usual suspects in so they can make their money without lifting a finger.
I spent a lot of time and money on a rural internet project in Canada. Every time we entered a community suddenly there would be a project from the local telcos and cable companies to wire up that one community. They would never do this proactive, just reactive and unless we threatened to move in they would never lift a finger and continue to charge an arm and a leg for some ridiculously slow service.
These government sanctioned monopolies are terrible for Canada.
It was the same thing with Google Fiber in the US, Comcast/AT&T sit on their asses for years and then suddenly when there’s competition they rush to launch gigabit service in the same cities as Google.
Isn't that exactly how you'd expect competition to work? (Note, neither of those companies are "government sanctioned monopolies" anywhere in the U.S. They may be a "de facto" monopoly in any given place.)
At least in the US, they're "government sanctioned" in the sense that the local city government may have signed a contract that gives them exclusivity in certain neighborhoods. I've been told "that's Comcast's neighborhood" by a competing ISP in the past.
If you mean that it's not state or federal, that's right (as far as I know).
A key point from https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1072/9... is that wired technologies are inherently natural monopolies and you only get competition when government intervenes, while wireless is inherently NOT a natural monopoly so you get competition UNLESS government intervenes.
The behavior that you observed is perfectly rational when connectivity is delivered over a wire. The goal is to make it clear to the competitor that they can't make money anywhere that they try to compete.
But in this case SpaceX will be delivering connectivity to everywhere, all at once. The targeted efforts that incumbents can use to shut down local upstarts don't work when the location to exert extra effort in is "everywhere".
That's an interesting observation about government intervention.
It's usually only possible for the public to see overt government intervention, but once in a while you see a situation where a government drops a case.
Directional antennas make wireless spectrum a lot closer to infinite. For example, I believe that SpaceX has committed that their ground stations will never transmit straight towards geostationary orbit, meaning that Starlink can use the same frequency bands as geostationary satellite services. With proper coordination, increasingly narrow beams can transmit increasingly more data over the same spectrum.
So in this case the entrenched providers would typically try to influence at the regulatory level. For example, no spectrum, no business license etc. We, the public, weren't invited to those closed door meetings but I'd sure like to read the transcripts.
Without a sanctioned monopoly and a gigantic head start, often because of government privatization, this natural monopoly story doesn't really hold up that well. Its unlikely that one company would capture the whole market.
The same thing has happened to me. I even had a Hydro One ADET tell me that one of the incumbent's accelerated builds in a neighbourhood I was trying to get a permit for were all unauthorized attachments built months before Hydro One issued the permit. When I spoke to the competition bureau competition bureau the only reason they didn't think there was a case is because it "wasn't systemic" (the other 2 conditions met were clearly evidence of anti-competitive behaviour).
I yearn for the day when our god-awful telecommunications industry finely catches up to the rest of the world. I just moved back from France, and its better keeping my French number’s international plan (18 euros a month for 30 gigs of data) then any competing canadian offer. Since I have a phone supporting dual sim, ill probably get the cheapest canadian plan I can just so that I have a canadian number.
If spacex wants to do this, I’m all for it
Edit: I know the article isnt targeting this, I just cant help but rant
If your phone supports wifi calling, it should work with a StarLink ground terminal (or if StarLink partners with an OEM who can build them voice terminals with a satellite-capable antenna Iridium style).
In my little province I recall fiber being run one summer in the early 1990s. I assumed it was future proofing for the Internet which most local people hadn't heard of yet.
But 25 years later there are constant political squabbles over why no ISP has followed through. Many plans and lots of money has been spent planning but then an election occurs.
The newly elected party exclaims the other guys had it all wrong and we need to start over.
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[ 371 ms ] story [ 3366 ms ] thread1. SpaceX will also offer high frequency travel in space and around earth
> Elon Musk's SpaceX has applied to offer high-speed internet to Canadians living in remote areas by beaming it to them via satellites.
Nowadays they just look at other plans and say, nope, you're on something better than anything we offer now.
FWIW Fizz is the new hotness here. They have worse coverage outside of metros, cheaper base plans, zero phone customer service (problem for negotiating cheaper deals I imagine), and rollover data, which Virgin does not.
Quote: ------
The CRTC requires telephone and cable companies to sell access to their networks to independent Internet service providers (ISPs) at regulated wholesale prices.
They wouldn't when they realise that it is a cheaper alternative to existing satellite internet services, not cable internet. Also that it would have reception issues in urban and suburban areas which is why they are targeting rural areas.
They do? I live in northern New England an hour so from the border and have some Canadian friends who complain that they have at best the same sort of mediocre 5-10/1-2 ADSL I did up until a year or two ago when fiber became available. They refer to their phone company as "the Jolly Roger" with all said connotations. Looking at this Canadian National Broadband Internet Service Availability Map seems to back that up too:
https://www.ic.gc.ca/app/sitt/bbmap/hm.html?lang=eng
Looks like even 50/10 let alone anything better has pretty minimal penetration, with a lot on really mediocre speeds providing wider areas. Even before sat<>sat optical, Starlink has potential to do a lot better for a lot more people. And once density gets good enough with sat<>sat links, Starlink may flat out offer better latency to remote parts of the world then existing connections thanks to the 40% speed benefit of c in a vaccum/air vs non-photonic bandgap fiber and a more point-to-point topology. That won't matter to everyone but it may be very valuable to certain remote workers.
People are often better at complaining than at remedying their situation.
Some years ago now I was at a friend's flat. He lamented that ASDL was poor. "They'll never offer anything better here" he said. I thought that was odd because I thought I'd seen a cabinet for his section of the district where we both live. So I suggested he check. He waved me off, no need to bother right because he's sure it isn't an option. So I typed his address into the checker and it said he could buy 80Mbps vDSL.
As a result of course he has 80Mbps vDSL. Now, if I'd just agreed "Yeah, it sucks" how long do you think he would have taken to realise he could buy faster service? A year? Five years? Maybe he'd still be moaning now on our Friday Jitsi call instead of complaining that the terrible webcam setup he cobbled together back in late March sucks?
And people have investigated because basically not having internet is something of a pain but it is what it is.
Starlink definitely will be able to at least smooth out the current total patchwork. The question will just be if it's a low density area and (while constellation is building and before optical interlink sats) if it's in a covered zone. Won't always be the best option I'm sure, but it won't be the case that two people a mere half mile away as the crow flies with a small hill between them have to deal with total feast/famine differences.
I know Canada is a huge, sparsely populated country with many isolated, remote communities. But I'm astounded that "30 kilometres north of Toronto" is considered one of those locations so remote that you can't get fast, affordable internet service. So it seems like there are potentially a lot of "remote" Canadians.
https://services.crtc.gc.ca/pub/instances-proceedings/Defaul...
Western Canada only has one rural ISP of note: Xplorenet. Competition would be a welcome change here.
They tend to figure things on the way. Or not :)
>Carol Jobity of Adjala-Tosorontio, just west of Barrie, Ont., is similarly supportive.
>"Please approve this," Jobity wrote to the regulator. "We're in support 100 per cent."
>Iqaluit resident Brandt Chu said he's in favour of the proposal because of how remote life can be in Nunavut.
I find it a bit amusing that 2/3 of the people complaining live in municipalities within commuting distance of Toronto. Surely CBC could have found comments from more than one Canadian who actually lives in a remote rural area, Barrie and Cedar Valley do not count. Those two areas would be better served by a wireless ISP, unlike truly remote areas which make up large swaths of the province.
It's not an environmental thing that gets transferred by geography so comparing the commute distance doesn't make sense. More accurate correlation would be household income in the neighborhoods there is lack of Internet.
As for household income proximity to Toronto is an indicator of wealth in itself.
I don't mean this in a belittling way, but if you are from California your concept of 'remote' is vastly different to ours in Ontario, where we have less than half the population in ~2.5x the landmass, and that population is mostly in the Toronto area. Now imagine what 'remote' must mean in the less populated provinces and territories (Ontario is the most populated province).
> It's not an environmental thing that gets transferred by geography so comparing the commute distance doesn't make sense.
Proximity to Canada's economic and telecommunications hub (Toronto) does in fact influence access to the Internet.
>More accurate correlation would be household income in the neighborhoods there is lack of Internet.
There is access to the Internet in the two communities I mentioned, which is why I brought it up in the first place. The access isn't as good as downtown Toronto or some areas in the suburbs, but in comparison to actual remote areas it is fantastic.
My entire point in the comment that you replied to is mentioning Barrie and Cedar Valley in the same breath as Iqaluit, a place so remote even access to basic foods is expensive, is absurd.
I know you don't know where any of these places are.
So it’s easy on a rural road even near a big city to have very, very few options if the cable company didn’t bother to run a wire down your particular street.
Not sure if it has changed since, but here’s another example: https://www.theifp.ca/news-story/8404569-xplornet-north-halt...
I imagine we’ll hear fewer stories like this within 5 years now, but it’s been a long time coming — even if you have LTE service, it’s not cheap enough for data-hungry TVs and PCs.
My point isn't that these areas are fine and don't need better service, my point is they should not be compared to truly remote areas without even basic cell service (there are a lot of these if you drive north about 6 hours).
Getting annoying that people are trying to rebut a claim I didn't make when all I'm doing is bitching about the CBC in keeping with Canadian tradition.
It's been a long time since I had to use satellite, but I'd happily take even the most oversubscribed WISP out there over satellite internet.
That's the only place the service will function, unless you're using it in a park or field somewhere in the GTA... so yeah I guess.
Assuming your roof is the same height or higher than nearby roofs and other obstructions.
The target market for Starlink -- according to Musk -- is "the 3% to 4% of the population who are hardest to reach through terrestrial networks".
So yes, "the boonies" are the market. Almost no one reading this is in that market.
It seems self evident to me that the intended customers can't be urban, suburban or even exurban residences; the satellites won't be able to serve a large population of closely spaced transceivers.
They don’t have internet service available.
And he is promising them a better internet.
I would not worry about that.
"At the time BRINCO was praised for having built the station with no public money from Newfoundland, while Hydro-Québec assumed nearly all the financial risk. It is unlikely that BRINCO would have found other investors willing to take on that risk.[11] In 1981 it made a good return on the investment at almost no risk.[6]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Falls_Generating_Sta...
I don't want to see the actual ISPs become government-run, just the local fiber between users and the nearest meet-me room. Let people have a choice of who lights up that fiber, and what bandwidth and services they want, but make it possible for anyone to compete without trenching their own fiber. (And, closely related, make sure every new development has not just conduit but fiber through that conduit for every home.)
Here in DC, the public labor unions forced the government to rehire subway inspectors who had gotten fired for falsifying inspection logs. (Public police systems in the U.S. face the same exact problem, except with far deadlier consequences.)
As a Canadian I'm pretty excited about the potential for good internet outside of the cities and well beaten paths.
FCC filings suggest 25 is the absolute minimum for service, the final constellation is likely to use somewhere in 40-60 as the actual limit.
I've received this question a few times now, anyone have a better name? Or maybe I should just add a ? button with a diagram?
So the diagram may be the best option, maybe with a Wikipedia link if there's an appropriate one?
https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/message_example.cfm
https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/images/astro_horizon.png
An optimist might believe Starlink will work at 10° above the horizon. A pessimist might doubt anybody will get it working below 80° (ie almost directly overhead). The reality is likely to be in between and this UI lets you see the effect.
For the curious, here is the wikipedia page [2] with details on the US Space Surveillance Network used to obtain this data (30+ ground-based radars and optical telescopes worldwide, plus 6 satellites in orbit).
[1] https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/supplemental/ (didn't link directly to the starlink txt file on purpose, link for reference only, please don't hug the site to death)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...
I grabbed a set of TLEs from celestrak (which I'm serving from my site), and then I propagate them forward with satellite-js [1] to the current date 6 times a second.
[1] https://github.com/shashwatak/satellite-js
There's also a second stage that will cover the poles (they're required by the us government to get Alaska iirc), so eventually it will cover all of it.
I have friends who live in Iqaluit, Nunavut. It's a nice place to live with a cool community, but everything there is very expensive, including internet service. How about $399/month for 5 Mbps service, capped at 55 GB? And that's with the resident's discount! If Starlink were available here it would be an absolute game changer.
https://www.qiniq.com/internet/
Seriously though, the population of Nunavut is roughly 40k. I guess that 90% of them are potential customers so maybe I shouldn't dismiss them too early, but you can see why I think SpaceX is right to consider them (and the other northern areas) lower priority.
But there are stripes over specific areas of interest, like Canada and Africa. Maybe it's just coincidence that I looked at it when they were there?
My great circle skills are lacking, and looking at a globe it seems like a lot of water for the rest of the orbit.
(Come to think of it, with the PSPS phenomenon here in NorCal, I might end up being that bored guy this very year!)
With a LEO constellation, unlike GEO, you can not just serve a single area. That is why you have to go with a very big, worldwide system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meridian_(satellite)
The orbit those are doing (a Molniya orbit) means they are looking down at Russia for many hours, then they zip around the far side of the globe quickly, then back to hanging over Russia.
Geostationary is cool, but it's very expensive, and lots of Russia is very far North for which Geostationary sucks anyway. So, do cheaper orbits with more birds, but with a very eccentric orbit and voila, you've solved the problem.
Highlights:
"[Pic of 12h orbit] Usually the period from perigee +2 hours to perigee +10 hours is used to transmit to the northern hemisphere."
"In practice, a satellite in a Molniya orbit serves the same purpose for high latitudes as a geostationary satellite does for equatorial regions, except that multiple satellites are required for continuous coverage."
However that's a bit of a simplification that ignores things like the need for ground stations, local laws (I will be astounded if they're allowed to broadcast over China), gaps in their orbital shells (such gaps probably don't actually exist, I haven't looked carefully at their orbits), local obstructions like mountains/valleys, etc
Eventually they won't, right now they do.
Anecdotal data point: For a while, AT&T had an North-America wide plan for $~40/45 for month with 10G LTE with the rest being 3G. I kept this in Canada because there would be nothing close to this there - it was cheaper to use the American service.
I've always used my own phone with prepaid plans and the cheapest plans in Canada are awful compared to the cheapest plans in the USA. I also lived in the GTA, not some remote village.
When I traveled in Africa several years ago I paid about $20 for a one month data plan (1GB IIRC) that included a usb dongle to connect to my laptop. In Canada the same service would have cost ~$100 at the time.
The duopoly in Canada ensures little will change unless it's mandated by legislation. Having Musk enter the fray is welcomed news.
Yes we get hosed on roaming (even you Rogers). But, it turns out a local sim is inexpensive, unlocking is guaranteed free even even under that contract (for more than a year now)
It was terrible, it's currently improving. It doesn't compare to a £15 sim in London with 15GB of data and unlimited chat/text in 2017. Nor do the plans for Canada's shorts[0]
[0] : https://www.google.com/search?q=canada's+shorts
"Service levels of 100 Mbps down / 40 Mbps up would generally be anticipated, but depends on how dense the user-base is within a region. Latency will be very low, ~30 ms or so, far quicker than existing satellite-based solutions due to our much lower orbit, and comparable to fiber. User segment is a 19-inch electronically steered antenna, mounted on one’s rooftop."
And a more recent test by the Air Force measured 610 Mbps with an aircraft in flight, though of course there was very little contention to worry about.
I spent a lot of time and money on a rural internet project in Canada. Every time we entered a community suddenly there would be a project from the local telcos and cable companies to wire up that one community. They would never do this proactive, just reactive and unless we threatened to move in they would never lift a finger and continue to charge an arm and a leg for some ridiculously slow service.
These government sanctioned monopolies are terrible for Canada.
If you mean that it's not state or federal, that's right (as far as I know).
The behavior that you observed is perfectly rational when connectivity is delivered over a wire. The goal is to make it clear to the competitor that they can't make money anywhere that they try to compete.
But in this case SpaceX will be delivering connectivity to everywhere, all at once. The targeted efforts that incumbents can use to shut down local upstarts don't work when the location to exert extra effort in is "everywhere".
It's usually only possible for the public to see overt government intervention, but once in a while you see a situation where a government drops a case.
If spacex wants to do this, I’m all for it
Edit: I know the article isnt targeting this, I just cant help but rant
But 25 years later there are constant political squabbles over why no ISP has followed through. Many plans and lots of money has been spent planning but then an election occurs.
The newly elected party exclaims the other guys had it all wrong and we need to start over.