I am off to Baikonur, Kazakhstan next week to watch the launch of Xplornet’s 4G satellite, designed to bring faster and more affordable broadband connections to more Canadians in rural and remote areas, beyond the reach of terrestrial facilities.
Xplornet has secured 100% of the Canadian Ka-band capacity on the Viasat-1 4th generation broadband satellite; it will use that entirely for rural broadband.
Together with the planned launch of a second, similar 4G satellite in 2012 and with its national fixed-wireless 4G network, Xplornet says it will effectively end Canada’s urban / rural digital-divide. 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, with the ability to provide broadband service to 1.5 million customers in North America.
With the launch planned for Wednesday, Canada joins a group of other countries (including France, Germany, the UK, Australia and India) that have endorsed 4G satellite as the solution for ensuring universal access to affordable broadband. These next generation satellites deliver more than ten times the speed and capacity of current systems, at a much lower cost per customer.
I’m proud to be associated with the team at Xplornet and I look forward to sharing the excitement of next week’s launch with you. Be sure to monitor Xplornet’s countdown website for a live feed of the launch.
This is great news, I sat next to John Maduri on a flight recently and we discussed this new development which is very close to my rural heart and I found myself very excited. Today I live with fixed wireless delivering a consistent 720Kbps with the occasional tease of about 1.1Mbps. Given I am myself in the IT field this is just simply painful so I welcome any increase I can find.
That said… I am now completely disheartend and frankly very irritated. It drives me absolutely nuts to read your remark above citing the greater capacity of up to 25Mbps download speeds only to then to turn and look at the new package offerings and see that the best possible offering is not in that 25Mbps range but rather is limited to 5Mbps at $89/month. Saying that this new offering effectively ends our digital divide is not only irritating but inaccurate. Access to a service that is a mear $10 cheaper than the cable provider’s top service but is offering 1/10th of the performance and 1/3rd of the capacity is not catching up but rather more like arriving at a party that ended three years ago. With a 24 month test/build/launch cycle for this service model to innovate and advance the gap will continue to compound with every passing year. Please stop declaring a grand victory on this front as you have won a gun battle for a tiny island population but the rest of the war has grown to a whole continent and gone nuclear.
There is no question at all that this is a big win for the truely remote user and raises our country’s holistic measure of broadband access on the world stage and I appluad this as it is a major achievement. What truely needs to be addressed in order to make a quantum leap in our technology this space is to bring parity to the “urban edge” population which are our fastest growing communities. The CRTC and Industry Canada need to evolve in their governing practices to enable more nimble and innovative services to reach this edge population who’s communiies are within a few kilometers of core urban services but because of the unrealiztic territories and service spectrums defined by the CRTC and IC have essentially monopolized these communities to tier 1 providers. 4G WiMAX is a much more scalable technology capable of delivering a far more competitive service performance wise with a much lower delivery cost option… except that Industry Canada licensing practices make it economically infeasable to the smaller providers to take on. WiMAX is the service that can rapidly deliver a competitive solution to the bulk of the communities on the urban edge, we should be looking at 4G satellite as the solution that it truely is and for who it is ideally intended for… the truly rural and the obviously remote populations. For that huge urban edge population who are caught between and ignored as a result of focusing only on these true remote populations and the fully serviced urban centres, 4G satellite running at 5Mbps is simply next generation dial-up, no more no less.