Telesat to spend $40 million as share of upgrade to northern broadband services

Paul Bush, Telesat’s vice-president of business development, speaks to the Northern Lights trade show conference in Ottawa Feb. 2, the same day Telesat announced plans to spend $40 million to upgrade broadband equipment and services in Nunavut and across the country’s northern territories. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

OTTAWA -— Satellite provider Telesat said Feb. 2 that it plans to spend $40 million to upgrade broadband equipment and services in Nunavut and across the northern territories over the next 10 years.

Paul Bush, Telesat’s vice-president of business development, said the upgrades would address the gaps identified in a recent communications assessment report prepared by the Northern Communications and Information Systems working group.

The report painted the Arctic communications scene as one riddled by high prices, slow service, and gaps in service areas.

Telesat pegged the cost of upgrades over the next 10 years at $160 million, of which the company is prepared to spend 25 per cent, or $40 million, as its share.

The rest of the funding would come through the federal and territorial governments, to be decided after officials sit down with members of the northern communications working group.

The upgrades would more than double the communications capacity serving the Arctic, Bush said, while providing redundancy to protect northern communities in the event of service breakdowns

Telesat’s plan, called the Arctic Communications Infrastructure Initiative, proposes to contribute to the addition of up to 15 new transponders — which transmit signals from its satellites — and upgrade its northern ground equipment.

“The immediate benefits of this proposal would be that it bridges the infrastructure gap today,” said Bush, speaking to the Northern Lights trade show conference in Ottawa Feb. 2. “We don’t have to build anything — the satellites are there.”

Bush said Telesat’s Anik F1R, F2, F3 satellites have sufficient capacity to meet the requirements of northern communications, while its proposed upgrades could be implemented in less than a year.

That’s despite an outage of the Anik F2 last October, which shut down communications across most of Nunavut for 16 hours. Bush said Telesat’s satellites work “99.9 per cent of the time.”

But Douglas Cunningham, CEO of Arctic Fibre said his company’s plan to build a fibre optic line across the Northern Passage – which he says would replace Nunavut’s satellite dependency — provides a much more efficient, long-term solution to the Canadian Arctic’s communication shortfalls.

Speaking at the Northern Lights conference alongside Bush, Cunningham suggested that the threat of competition spurred Telesat’s latest funding announcement.

He also accused Industry Canada and Telesat of enjoying a “too cozy” relationship, calling on the $120 million of work needed to fund Telesat’s new proposal to be put out for public tender.

But if fibre optic and satellite are both vying to lead the future of Arctic communications, Tom Bachelder, co-chair of the Northern Communication working group, says that’s a good thing.

“I’d like to see both initiatives go ahead and benefit all the residents of the North,” Bachelder told an audience at the Northern Lights conference. “The more means we have available is only going to benefit us in the future.”

“How it works out financially, I don’t know,” he added. “But I’d like to see more initiatives like this and others come out as a result of the report.”

The Northern Communications and Information Systems working group meets next in May 2012 in the Yukon Territory, where the Nunavik region has been welcomed to sit at the table for the first time.