{"id":65963,"date":"2018-02-28T21:49:01","date_gmt":"2018-02-28T13:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/telesats-new-hts-to-triple-bandwidth-speeds-in-northern-canada\/"},"modified":"2018-02-28T21:49:01","modified_gmt":"2018-02-28T13:49:01","slug":"telesats-new-hts-to-triple-bandwidth-speeds-in-northern-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/telesats-new-hts-to-triple-bandwidth-speeds-in-northern-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"Telesat\u2019s New HTS to Triple Bandwidth Speeds in Northern Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Bell Canada <\/strong>subsidiary Northwestel<\/strong> is on track to connect all 25 Nunavut communities in northern Canada thanks to its partnership with satellite operator Telesat<\/strong>. In an interview with Via Satellite<\/em>, Northwestel President Curtis Shaw said the latest contract inked between the two companies for capacity on the Telstar 19 Vantage High Throughput Satellite (HTS) will enable Northwestel to meet its goal of connecting all 38,000 Nunavut residents by 2019.<\/p>\n

SpaceX <\/strong>will launch Telstar 19 Vantage to 63 degrees west sometime in the second quarter of this year. Once operational, it will boast the most capacity of any satellite in Telesat\u2019s Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) fleet, which Northwestel will leverage to bring internet speeds to Nunavut that are on par with Canada\u2019s other northern territories. According to Shaw, Northwestel will be able to offer its residential customers download speeds of 15 Mbps \u2014 three times faster than what is currently available \u2014 while also increasing the monthly data usage cap to 100 GB.<\/p>\n

The Nunavut government will also take advantage of the improved connectivity for education and health care applications, Shaw said. Health centers in the region, usually staffed by just one or a few nurses in each community, rely heavily on the internet for remote diagnostics and consults with hospitals in the south. \u201cSchools today that have a single DSL line or a 2 Mbps connection are now going to have a 100 Mbps connection,\u201d Shaw added. \u201cSo I think you\u2019ll see a major impact in terms of distance education and what teachers can do in the communities, because right now they\u2019re very bandwidth-constrained.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Northwestel\u2019s new antenna at Cambridge Bay. Photo: Northwestel.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Serving a region like Nunavut comes with a distinct set of challenges for telecommunications providers. Northwestel alone covers Canada\u2019s three northern territories \u2014 Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut \u2014 which altogether comprise more than four million square kilometers, a full two-thirds of the Canadian landmass. And yet despite this yawning expanse, the region has a limited residential population at just 120,000 people. Half of those customers are located in two communities in the west, White Horse and Yellow Knife, and so expanding connectivity to the sparse population in the east can be both expensive and time-consuming.<\/p>\n

Just one community in the Yukon, Old Crow, uses satellite instead of fiber; in contrast, all of Nunavut is served by satellite, Shaw said. \u201cFiber is being looked at [for Nunavut] but it\u2019s not for the faint of heart,\u201d he said. Not only would Northwestel have to wrestle with the powerful tides that sweep the Nunavut shoreline, but also six months out of the year the ocean along the coast freezes over. When it melts again in the spring, \u201cif your cable isn\u2019t buried and armored [the ice] rips it right out,\u201d Shaw said. Moreover, the cost of intercepting the fiber line between Newfoundland and Greenland to redirect it to Iqaluit, Nunavut\u2019s capital, would be anywhere between CA$80 million and CA$100 million. While Northwestel is contemplating extending its fiber lines to some Nunavut communities, Telstar 19 Vantage\u2019s high throughput beams and total coverage of the region give it an economic advantage. \u201cWe\u2019re looking at [fiber] today, but satellite for the foreseeable future is going to play a major role in the development of the territory,\u201d Shaw said.<\/p>\n

The Nunavut region is also unique in its demographic makeup. The median age is just 24 years old \u2014 half of Canada\u2019s median at 40 \u2014 and more than 30 percent of the population is under the age of 15, almost twice the national average. As a result, one of the biggest trends driving bandwidth demand in Nunavut is mobile internet use. \u201cYou\u2019ll see homes with four or five cellphones in them but maybe not a landline internet connection,\u201d Shaw said. \u201cThe mobile network is advancing at a much bigger clip than you\u2019d see in other jurisdictions in North America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, much of what the Nunavut population uses the internet for is similar to their southern neighbors. \u201cYou see the same major applications running across the network: streaming TV, connected homes, education, entertainment, web surfing,\u201d Shaw said.<\/p>\n

How that demand will change or accelerate in the near future as connectivity improves remains to be seen. Shaw admitted that while 15-year contracts have become standard in the satellite industry, it\u2019s difficult to predict customer behavior more than a decade out. To maximize the value of the spacecraft as it ages, Telesat designed Telstar 19 Vantage with the capability to redirect bandwidth from community to community. \u201cIf fiber lands in one of the larger communities, we can redirect bandwidth to one of the smaller communities,\u201d Shaw said. \u201cIt keeps the technology future-proof and will accommodate new technology developments on the horizon.\u201d<\/p>\n

To date, Northwestel has completed six new ground stations in preparation for Telstar 19 Vantage\u2019s launch, with another 19 to go before it introduces the new service next year. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to have a lion\u2019s share of the work done by the end of 2018,\u201d Shaw said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bell Canada subsidiary Northwestel is on track to connect all 25 Nunavut communities in northern Canada thanks to its partnership with satellite operator Telesat. In an interview with Via Satellite, Northwestel President Curtis Shaw said the latest contract inked between the two companies for capacity on the Telstar 19 Vantage High Throughput Satellite (HTS) will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65963"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}