In April, the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Later this month, a Proton M rocket is scheduled to lift off from that same facility, carrying with it Viasat-1, the fourth generation satellite that will power dramatic capacity expansion to provide rural broadband in Canada.
ViaSat-1 can support customer download speeds of up to 25 Mbps; its capacity is greater than the capacity of all current North American broadband satellites combined. Xplornet has secured all of the Canadian Ka-band capacity on this advanced satellite, and it expects the satellite service to be available to Canadians late this year.
The value of this new capacity was demonstrated with the 16 hour outage of Telesat’s Anik F2 satellite yesterday.
A game-changer in terms of ubiquitous broadband access in Canada, ViaSat-1 will allow for previously unavailable speed and bandwidth economics, and will provide Canadians in its footprint, which includes many remote areas, the opportunity to get a broadband connection that is truly fast and affordable.
Xplornet has a special website (4gsatellite.ca) that allows you to share in the excitement as launch day approaches. The space shot will be streamed to a live feed on that site.
I’ll be writing more as the countdown continues.