[sandworm101]

I read so many stories about companies with new ideas for satellite internet. But i am visiting my parents next weekend. Their house is off grid in rural BC. They only have one internet option: a dish pointed to a geostationary sat which I will no doubt have to repoint on saturday. They pay insane rates for practically no bandwidth. There is only the one company: explorenet. When exactly are any of these innovations going to hit the canadian market?

[walrus01]

Without asking too much detail, approximately where is there house? Is there any chance there is a regional WISP they could get service from?

In general, consumer grade VSAT service via geostationary satellite should be a last resort, if anything else is available. The economics of launching 5000 kilogram satellites into geostationary orbits mean that transponder kHz in Ku/Ka-band spot beams need to be significantly oversubscribed.

The actual cost of satellite capacity, translating dedicated (1:1 ratio) Mbps into transponder capacity, plus the cost of running earth stations on the ISP uplink side, can range from $1800 to $5500 per Mbps per month.

In order to make any money at all off a large number of $100 to $150/month consumer grade VSAT services it needs to be radically oversubscribed.

Xplornet has a particularly bad reputation as an ISP in general, which doesn't help.

Things like SpaceX's starlink or other upcoming LEO/MEO services like Oneweb are promising. But not available yet.

Point to multipoint wireless last mile via 2.4/3.5/3.65/5.2/5.8 GHz bands can be much more effective. It's even possible for WISPs to offer 75 Mbps x 25 Mbps packages based off the latest Ubiquiti 802.11ac gen2 platforms, Cambium PMP450 or Mimosa A5 AP radio platforms.

Disclaimer: I work in both satellite Internet and point-to-point/point-to-multipoint microwave and millimeter wave.

[sandworm101]

Egmont BC. Only 80km (50 miles) from Vancouver. Not exactly remote by Canada or even British Columbia standards. It is also only 79km from Whistler, but look at what stands between Egmont and whistler to get an idea BC terrain.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Egmont,+BC+V0N+2H4/@49.750...

I've looked into every option. The irony is that the nearest cell tower is just over a kilometer away. The problem is the rocky terrain and dense pacific coastal rain forest. Trees heavy with water droplets suck up everything, from sound to radio. It is shocking how a heavy mist dulls everyone's cellphone boosters. Voice calls only last a second or two even on dry days. Everyone uses text messaging.

There have been many multipoint proposals. The problem is the rugged coast. Even a 1000' tower wouldn't have line of sight to every house. It would take all sorts of relays atop individual hills. And those relays need power, which is tricky. Buried lines aren't an option (rock) and towers are expensive (forest).

[walrus01]

Yeah, that is going to be a hard location to reach. Took a look at it from Google Earth / satellite view for a few minutes. The best option I can realistically think of is for a group of 7 to 20 people to share the cost for a larger, much more serious geostationary vsat terminal (not some xplornet consumer grade stuff), like a 2.4 meter ku-band dish with 20W BUC and modern iDirect modem, and find a vsat ISP with ku band spot coverage of the area to pay for access.

You'd be looking at like $800 a month for a better chunk of bandwidth. Then divide that by the number of local users in the Egmont town are you can connect through it, building a very small micropop WISP setup. Something like a mimosa a5c on a pole in a central location and c5c CPE radios with 24-30dB gain dishes on the client side. And a small mikrotik router between the mimosa and the vsat modem.

Divided by enough people it could work out to around $80-100 per residence per month. This assumes that somebody with a modicum of networking clue can run the local end for free, a few hours a week for maintenance and monitoring.

[sandworm101]

Yup. Thanks for looking. Getting everyone on board with a 10 to 20-house collective would be very hard. The terrain is really unforgiving. All the houses are by the water, with steep rocky hills behind them. Any maintenance is a big issue. That "somebody with a modicum of networking clue" doesn't live in Egmont.

Atm my parents are paying 100/month for sat internet, and another 50 for sat TV. It suits their needs today but they know that when the grandkids are a little older bandwidth will be an issue. When I visit I bring them thumbdrives full of all TV shows they cannot get.

[walrus01]

The other best possible option would be a single access point, somewhat up on a hill, possibly mounted to a tree with TV white space radio gear, just across the water from Egmont, with sector antennas aimed at the town. Redline and a few others have commercial TVWS band access point radios for the 500 to 800 MHz bands (various models available) which can cut through trees for non line of sight radio pretty effectively. You'd still need to get some kind of semi-decent dedicated broadband connection to the AP site, such as a 20 Mbps x 20 Mbps to Telus in Sechelt or Gibsons.

[thebigspacefuck]

Looks like you can get 25 Mbps with a 300GB cap for $120. That's not bad IMO. I'm paying $40/month for 25Mbps but I also live in the city so other things are more expensive.

[goodcanadian]

When exactly are any of these innovations going to hit the canadian market?

When are they going to hit any market? There are plenty of companies promising the world, but it is a difficult, expensive, and time consuming problem. I believe better options will come, but I don't see any on the near term horizon.

[awake]

Checkout starlink the satellite network being created by spacex. Here is a good FAQ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/7zqm2c/starlink_f...

[sandworm101]

Great, but while i see lots of talk of this for ships and planes i've seen not a single file or application from spacex to become a residential provider anywhere, much less in canada. So they remain perpetually 10+ years away.

[walrus01]

It is much more likely that it will be economical to use in a similar method to o3b, to bring a decent amount of capacity to a single location (example: totally isolated very rural valley somewhere in northern BC), and then distribute bandwidth from there.

The link budget problems for gain and EIRP, and cost of CPE, may make it cost prohibitive to put individual CPEs on peoples' roofs as a competitor to last mile WISPs.

I can see a scenario where a WISP buys a $7000 to $15000 dual-antenna terminal and a monthly recurring service package in the $700 to $1200/mo range, for a decent chunk of semi-dedicated capacity, and then redistributes access from there.

For those who want to understand how this works, o3b at MEO works on the same general concept, but at a more expensive and high bandwidth scale. It's been operational for years now. There's lots of good reference material out there on O3B.

Take the same two-satellite make-before-break handoff system used by o3b and apply it to a much larger number of LEO satellites, and smaller terminals, that's the general idea of how oneweb and starlink are intended to work.

[gammatrigono]

https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-authorizes-spacex-provide-b...

Residential service filing probably (!) appears on the priority list after launching the 4-12,000 satellites into LEO.

[snowwindwaves]

We get satellite internet from Infosat also in BC. It's not cheap either though.

[sandworm101]

Different company, same sats iirc.