this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
170 points (98.3% liked)

Canada

8706 readers
1441 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories


πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


πŸ’» Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


πŸ’΅ Finance, Shopping, Sales


πŸ—£οΈ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Canada desperately needs a national strategic internet constellation.

Edit to fix link.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 31 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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

We need fibre everywhere.

[–] RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Fibre is not going to get us up north.

[–] dumblederp@aussie.zone 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

And satellite consolations don't. How are we launching them into space with our friends the Americans, Russia, China or India?

[–] RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

You use any of the launch providers, yes, including Arianspace.

[–] noxypaws@pawb.social 1 points 13 hours ago

I had to look up that name and I'm sure glad there's another E in there..

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day 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.

[–] Isaac@waterloolemmy.ca 2 points 1 day 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

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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/

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day 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.

[–] RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day 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.

[–] alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago (2 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.

[–] RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day 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.

[–] Isaac@waterloolemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca 2 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

I think Kessler is rather less of a concern than global climate change.

[–] alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 2 points 15 hours ago

And all those sattelites burning up on the atmosphere have absolutely no impact on climate?

[–] Isaac@waterloolemmy.ca 2 points 18 hours ago

Yea I can see that, we can live comfortably on earth with Kessler syndrome but some carrington event and already struggling populace would probably set us back a century at least and wed be trapped on earth nearly forever, or until we can solve Kessler syndrome

[–] alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

If you're so far in the woods that you need a satellite connection for Internet, you don't need a low ping. It's not with ruining our sky, radio astronomy and our atmosphere for a few people's convenience.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 1 points 14 hours ago

We are talking about problem in their living rooms or offices, not just on the trap line.

[–] Montreal_Metro@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

Eat your fibres, everyone.