Telesat rolls out high-speed Internet for northern business

Canada’s veteran satellite operator, Telesat Canada, is now offering a two-way high-speed Internet service to businesses and organizations in northern Canada.

It’s the first phase of a process that will see direct-to-home high-speed Internet hook-ups offered to consumers in Nunavut and northern Canada after the Anik F2 satellite is launched by the end of 2004.

Steve Lowe, Telesat Canada’s director of business services, says that Telesat’s new offering is the first high-speed satellite-powered Internet service available to users everywhere in North America – from the southern United States to the Canadian Arctic.

Lowe said the hardware needed to receive the service, which includes a satellite dish and a satellite modem, will cost between two and four thousand dollars, depending on where the customer is located.

After that, monthly charges would range from $200 to $400 – too expensive for home consumers, but affordable for small businesses and organizations looking for better Internet connectivity than they now get.

“The real model for this is a small business that has five to 10 computers in it,” Lowe said.

He said Telesat customers would enjoy download speeds of 500 kilobits per second – comparable to what’s available to people who subscribe to high-speed ADSL services in densely populated urban areas served by companies like Bell Sympatico.

Upload speeds would be slower – about 70 kilobits per second.

Small and medium-sized customers would buy the service from resellers, such as RamTelecom of Ottawa and Infosat Communications of Vancouver. Large customers, such as governments and big corporations, would buy the service directly from Telesat.

“The big variable in your territory is installation, though,” Lowe said.

That’s because many parts of the North require wider satellite dishes than the South, and in some places, piles must be driven to mount the dishes.

“In the Arctic, many of the buildings are not suited to putting antennas on the roof, so we tend to drive piles,” Lowe said.

Lowe said this current service is only a stepping-stone to what Telesat Canada plans to offer in the future: affordable broadband Internet to all northern consumers.

“This service is really a preliminary service. It’s like, phase one of getting high speed to the North,” Lowe said. “It resolves a lot of the issues, but it doesn’t have the same reach and throughput of what the true broadband for the North is going to have.”

By the end of 2004, Telesat Canada will have launched the Anik F2 satellite.

Unlike the Anik E2, which accommodates the company’s current high-speed offering, the new spacecraft will be designed specifically for broadband data communications.
After the Anik F2 is operating, northern Canadian consumers will likely be able to buy direct-to-home satellite Internet services – at affordable rates – probably by 2005.

But that’s not the only contribution that Telesat wants to make toward the improvement of telecommunications in the Arctic.

Stephane Giguere, Telesat’s eastern Canada sales manager, was in Iqaluit two weeks ago for preliminary meetings with Nunavut officials.

He said his company also wants to work with Nunavut communities to find ways of better serving their needs in areas like education and health.

“When you talk about areas like education and health there is a need for sustainable access to information,” Giguere said.

He also said that Nunavut officials told him that in an oral culture like Nunavut’s, there is a strong need for affordable videoconferencing services.

Telesat, which started out as a Crown corporation in the early 1970s, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Bell Canada Enterprises Inc.

It is providing the high-speed service in partnership with Spacenet Inc., a subsidiary of an Israeli company called Gilat Satellite Networks Inc.

The two firms are offering the service across all 50 U.S. states and all 13 Canadian provinces and territories.