By Ahmad Hathout
SATELLITE COMPANY TELESAT is gearing up to deliver details of its low-earth orbit constellation before the end of the year, its vice-president of North American sales said Friday.
“The plan is to announce the kick-off of our build program before year-end, and at this point we’re still on track to deliver our constellation,” Michele Beck said Friday at the virtual Canada’s Rural & Remote Broadband Conference. Telesat said it will have one part of its constellation in service by early 2023.
Telesat has yet to announce who will build its fleet of satellites or who will launch them. The company is looking to have about 300 satellites for its intial constellation.
The timeline comes in the same month that Telesat finalized a $600-million agreement with the federal government to purchase broadband capacity from its satellites over 10 years, as well as the more recent announcement that Telesat and Loral Space and Communications — a major shareholder in the Canadian company — are now one publicly-traded company on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
The Ottawa-based company will sell to businesses (which it has always done), as opposed to directly to customers, which is what its rival SpaceX will be doing. “I think direct-to-user is important,” Beck said. “There’s a lot of places in Canada that won’t get service through…some form of mobile tower, and those instances they will absolutely need a direct-to-user solution.”
Telesat’s satellites, which are interconnected with optical links that create a mesh for coverage using fewer of the flying machines, will beam capacity to dishes on towers for terrestrial distribution from there.
Friday’s discussion about LEO satellites, which the federal government is banking hard on to deliver much-needed connectivity in rural and remote areas of the country, opened up into a bit of a debate about the economics of the business and how important they will end up being for connectivity.
Samer Bishay, president and CEO of far north operator Iristel, which partnered in 2017 with Canadian LEO satellite company Kepler Communications, said LEOs won’t be the “end all, be all.” He said there are metrics that will determine how successful satellite services will be: how affordable they are — keeping in mind that the equipment fee (SpaceX currently has a fee of $649), while a one-time cost, is still out of reach for a lot of low-income families; how fluid the coverage is, from home all the way to the grocery store, for example and the quality of the coverage so as to reduce the limiting factor of satellite line of sight.
Bishay said satellite services will need to get into partnerships with mobile network operators and wireless internet service providers to tackle those components.
“There is not one-size-fits-all solution here,” Bishay said about the LEO hype.
But Rick Hodgkinson, CEO of Mississauga-based Galaxy Broadband, said he disagreed with some of Bishay’s points. “I think LEO is a very interesting part… of the future ecosystem, but I think it will play a bit bigger role than what you’re thinking,” he said to Bishay.
Hodgkinson said Galaxy has done rapid deployment where communities can get broadband relatively quickly and “a lot of communities can benefit from that,” he added. “Part of the complication that we face is the cost of deploying it with the current metrics of the geosatellites and the perception of value because of the latency — we face that challenge, but we can deliver the bits very quickly.
“With LEO, there’s the promise of much smaller, more portable ground systems, so I think it’s going to help in a lot of situations,” Hodgkinson said, adding satellite technology is known, stable, and has been used for many years for television.
The problem, he noted, is the economics, where the LEO business is reliant on high-volume satellite deployment for coverage. There’s only so much money to go toward broadband coverage and most of the world is connected via fibre or LTE. On that point, Bishay said it could come down to who’s first-to-market.
Though a key avoidance for even the most well-capitalized satellite endeavours like SpaceX’s Starlink is to avoid the bankruptcy fate of at least three other satellite companies earlier this year, Hodgkinson — who is a supporter of the backhaul project of Telesat and skeptical of the direct-to-consumer play — and Beck said there are different business models for satellites to tackle so it’s not entirely a game of race to the bottom.
Before the House of Commons industry committee, Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said he was worried about competing with Starlink. But at the conference — noting applications such as connecting internet-of-things devices, direct and non-direct to consumer models — Beck said: “if you’re targeting different markets, the world is a huge place, there’s considerable demand, and it will continue to grow — so there is room for multiple players in this space.”
After the conference we asked Telesat if it can share more details on its LEO announcement coming soon. “At this time, we don’t have more to share,” said a spokesperson.
