this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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Canada desperately needs a national strategic internet constellation.

Edit to fix link.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

We do not need a constellation. We do not need more space junk.

We need fibre everywhere.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Eat your fibres, everyone.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 hours ago (4 children)

Fibre is not going to get us up north.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Similar problems with fibre to all of Australia. It's just not feasible for small remote communities.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Microwave towers? They don't bridge enormous distances but can bypass areas that it would be inadvisable to lay cable

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Terrestrial solutions for remote areas typically have excessive build out and maintenance costs.

Engineers will do a tradeoff and select the most suitable solution given the criteria. It's very easy to underestimate costs, particularly over the entire lifetime of the system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Maybe when we get 6g and our avian bird flu boosters we can get 6g access through our minds 🀯

/s due to it being utterly insane, but I recognize Poe's law is alive more than ever now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

There are solutions for the far arctic that aren't high density mesh networks polluting low earth orbit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Yes there are such solutions, but for remote regions without infrastructure and with high build out and operating/maintenance costs for terrestrial technology, I suspect that the most cost effective solution that we can achieve in a timely fashion is probably LEO, like Lightspeed or Starlink. Particularly since Canada has half a century of experience building satellite systems.

Managing LEO debris and congestion is not an insurmountable challenge.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Buddy, I'm an aero eng. There are lots of ways to get satellites in polar orbits.

Why didn't you look at the actual Lightspeed site from Telesat? Why would you pick a random paper? The Telesat site explains how they get coverage in polar regions.

https://www.telesat.com/leo-satellites/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

There are lots of ways to get satellites in polar orbits.

Of course there are, but the customers are mostly not at the poles, so any times the satellites spend at the poles is wasted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

I suggest you look up the solution that Telesat will use. I'm not involved in that project, but a quick glance shows me that the engineers involved have probably done their homework and have considered the customer base and their needs, including the need to service all regions of the country.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

If we must have a satellite it should be a single geostationary one.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Geostationary satellites orbit at a height of 35,000 km. That means there's a huge lag, making the satellites unsuitable for interactive Internet, and it also means they're far away, so you need a big directional antenna to send data to them.

Starlink is awful, but you definitely don't want geostationary satellites for Internet.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Correctamundo. You can't speed up light. For low latency you need LEO, and since they don't sit still for you (8km/s roughly) you need a bunch of them in some kind of formation or constellation, so that you generally have something to connect to at any given moment, or at least a chain that can relay to ground stations.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Kessler syndrome has entered the chat

We could be architechting our own Great Filter (assuming we've not passed it already, and assuming we can't solve the Kessler syndrome).

Some light reading for those unfamiliar:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter