Indigenous legal advocates in northwestern Ontario are sounding the alarm over the Ontario government’s cancellation of its contract with Starlink, citing concerns with people’s access to legal services in remote First Nations.
Last month, Premier Doug Ford announced he’d be ripping up the $100-million deal with Elon Musk’s internet provider, as a retaliatory measure in the ongoing Canada-U.S. trade war.
But in northwestern Ontario, this means the end of the Starlink-Navigator Program delivered by Nishnawbe-Aski Legal Services Corporation (NALSC), which “permitted community members, who often do not have access to internet, or reliable internet, an opportunity to participate in virtual courts.”
Do we know if it is even possible for another company to take over starlink infrastructure ? These are satellites. It’s not like they’re cables in the ground.
Satellites that have to communicate with a ground station, unless they want to do all the traffic in a region over the laser links, but those links will have their own limitations.
I’m not sure what the ground infrastructure is specifically, is it spacex hardware that connects to local ISP stuff or is it their own ground based infrastructure. That ground infrastructure is usually what part of getting approved in a country involves. Doing only laser links for a whole country would be too much. (Edit: I mean it’d technically be doable, but it’d greatly reduce their network bandwidth vs having a closer ground station, so fewer users and lower speeds)
The other option would be a hybrid situation where starlink backhauls one of our telecos internet but the local infrastructure is built and owned by them. In the future you could then backhaul with another satellite network in theory. Basically drop a 4g/5g tower in the middle of nowhere and connect it to Starlink.