Telesat announced Tuesday (Jan. 11) a new memorandum of agreement allowing it to advance its plans to implement rural 5G service through its Lightspeed satellite constellation, although the timeline of the deployment remains uncertain.
Telesat says the newly announced agreement – which is focused on information-sharing and has no dollar value attached to it – with the Encqor 5G government-industry coalition will be an enhancement of their existing business plans. That’s because the MOU will allow for early-stage testing of applications, among other benefits. Encqor is a coalition of government partners in Canada, Quebec and Ontario, along with large technology partners such as Ericsson, Ciena, Thales, IBM and CGI.
In 2021, Telesat received substantial financial support ($1.44 billion) from the federal government, as well as other contracts with the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, to construct Lightspeed – a constellation expected to vastly improve connectivity in northern and remote areas of Canada traditionally lagging behind their urban neighbours in terms of Internet services.
Lightspeed was designed to include 5G, a Telesat representative said, but the new partnership now secures early testing of that capability as the satellites enter service. That service date is unknown at this time; initially, Telesat was aiming for service by late 2023, but supply chain issues affecting the industry at large may affect that timing, the company said in November following its quarterly results – and there are no updates as of this week, Telesat told SpaceQ.
Backhaul of 5G was always part of Telesat’s business model, Stephen Hampton, Telesat’s manager of government affairs, told SpaceQ. The partnership will allow Telesat to test out different applications of 5G, which can be used for everything from the “Internet of things,” advanced artificial intelligence, or high-speed connectivity in usually inaccessible areas.
“5G is a is a key application and vertical for Telesat through Lightspeed, and we designed our network specifically to ensure that we can provide very affordable, very dynamic, very high-speed, high-capacity, 5G backhaul,” Hampton said.
Implementing 5G in sparsely populated Canada shows the difficulty of keeping our vast geography connected, especially for its rural populations. On top of spectrum licences and equipment purchases, vendors working outside urban areas must contend with large distances and the pace of 5G spectrum auctions – which have been slower in Canada than in the very densely populated Europe or the United States – in planning out their deployments.
Canada is used to being a small player in a large international arena when it comes to space technologies, however. The way our country usually overcomes initial economies of scale challenges is by implementing larger partnerships in the style of Encqor’s. Hampton thus pointed to the Encqor partnership as key in helping Telesat, a small player always working to stay competitive with larger international satellite service providers in its market space, in remaining agile.
“This partnership is a great way to leverage the work being done here in Canada with all these companies,” he said. “It does help position [us] for the future, and position more of a global outlook, so we’re quite excited about that.”
Despite barriers of distance and cost, 5G is coming quickly to urban areas in Canada; after major government spectrum auctions last summer, Rogers Communications, Bell, Telus, TeraGo, Videotron, SaskTel and Xplornet are among the major companies with 5G networks in early 2022, according to LifeWire.com; among those, only Xplornet is dedicated to rural service. The federal government is currently debating whether to accept Huawei, a Chinese company, as a participant in 5G rollouts; both Canada and the U.S. (our major trading partner) have repeatedly condemned China’s security and democracy practices in recent months.
Telesat’s existing priority rights for Ka-band spectrum for Lightspeed, as well as other spectra for geosynchronous satellites, affords the company the capability to offer 5G service, Hampton said. For consumers, 5G will be provided through a mobile network operator, with Telesat providing the backhaul link and the operator working on “the last mile,” which is the industry term for providing connections from larger hubs to individual households. On the industrial side, Telesat will work directly with service operators to implement 5G service, Hampton added.
Hampton said Encqor provides ready access to a suite of partners ranging from equipment manufacturers, to network providers, to software experts. “With Telesat, what we’re doing is we’re adding a third really important dimension: space-based or satellite-based backhaul,” he explained.
“When someone’s trying to test an agriculture application, we can now also test it over a satellite-based solution,” he continued, adding that the advantage of Telesat’s technology is it will allow the company to be “technology agnostic in a lot of scenarios … so we’re adding that space-based satellite component to test out various applications and opportunities.”