In Canada's North, a Single Satellite Outage Means Losing Basic Services (vice.com) 101
Jordan Pearson, writing for Motherboard: Around 5 PM Eastern time on Sunday, a satellite providing internet services to most of North America went offline due to a technical glitch, the CBC reported. If you live the vast majority of communities in southern Canada or the US, you probably didn't notice. But in some parts of Canada's sparsely populated North, losing just one satellite means giving up basic services like access to ATMs or a flight out of town. In other words, life went offline before the satellite's function was restored on Monday afternoon. The satellite in question was Ottawa-based Telesat's Anik F2, which first went online in 2004 and has a coverage area spanning Canada's northernmost tip down to the southern US. Most places in North America don't totally depend on Anik F2 for an internet connection, and have landlines as well as other satellites -- even some of Telesat's -- to fall back on if one piece of equipment goes offline. But Canada's northern communities are desperately lacking in internet infrastructure, a situation that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged to remedy. Some places depend on Anik F2's connection for everything. There is no backup.
cats (Score:1)
Well did he use cat5 cable to connect with the satellite?
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Regardless their race, if some morons want to live in the middle of the wildness it's not everyone else's job to spend a ton of resources getting them reliable internet.
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Re:Space is a dead end (Score:4, Insightful)
Same rationale in the 40s and 50s maybe, why supply phone service to rural areas where they are too stupid to live in the cities?
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They supplied phone service to farmers, and it benefited every aspect of the business. It also was on the scope of tens to hundreds of miles between major cities, which wasn't really that expensive.
What we're talking about here is running cables over thousands of miles of empty territory just to connect a few hundred people at the next tiny town. We're talking desolate shitholes like Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut.
These places have about ONE TENTH the population density of Alaska, so excuse th
Re:Space is a dead end (Score:5, Insightful)
You make it sound like there's a handful of kooks living in a shed. That's bull. These are long-established and recognized communities, mining operations, fishing outposts, and the like. Isolated isn't remotely the same as being out in the middle of the wilderness.
The issue is that there's a single point of failure for what is a huge amount of the country's landmass. One that's only going to grow [wikipedia.org] in financial and military importance as time goes on. So why should Canada tolerate that? Satellite is the only viable option up north for good reason, but solutions still have to be found.
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A huge portion of landmass but a tiny portion of the population.
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Re:the unbearable whiteness of the far north (Score:1)
Regardless their race, if some morons want to live in the middle of the wildness it's not everyone else's job to spend a ton of resources getting them reliable internet.
Um.
They've been living there for tens of thousands of years.
Literally.
Meanwhile, you're the johnny come lately in this scenario
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The mining operations [jamaicaobserver.com] employing Canadians and paying royalties to the Canadian government might disagree with you here. Nevermind the fact that if you intend to regulate use of the Northwest passage, you're going to have to establish redundant wireless communications modes anyway.
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There's not a lot of people period. Mankind is able to do great things - when there's money to be made. Remove the profit motive though and most of mankind stops caring. Though occasionally fear is a motivator (oh noes, the Russians are going to be on the moon first!).
Counter examples though. The first major cellular phone infrastructure was up in running in northern Sweden and Finland, with not a lot of people. Although the people did have a higher than average standard of living, probably wouldnt hav
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@Anonynous coward [slashdot.org]: "If we (the human species) were able lay telegraph cables to span oceans in the 19th century, I'm sure we can lay a fiber optic cable over the ground to the North. Difficulty: there's not a lot of white people up there.
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Not far off. (Score:2)
The part they left out (Score:5, Funny)
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At 5,900 kilograms (13,000 lb), it is more than ten times the size of Anik A2 and yet still one of the smallest, least powerful communications satellites ever built, serving barely two dozen users in the remote community of Toque2Mukluk.
Anik F2 is a Boeing 702-series satellite, designed to support and enhance current North American voice, data, and broadcast services with its C- and Ku-band technologies. It is the fifteenth satellite to be launched by Telesat, and the first to achieve dual-band operation.
But they have... (Score:2)
But they have rocks and trees and rocks and rocks and trees and... WATER!!!
Why would they need Internet access!? pfffttt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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But they have rocks and trees and rocks and rocks and trees and... WATER!!!
Why would they need Internet access!? pfffttt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Sadly it doesn't look like there are too many Arrogant Worms fans on /. That's unfortunate, as they are pretty much awesome. :-)
Move? (Score:1)
If you really care about being "connected", don't live in the Canadian arctic. Easy.
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I'm pretty sure air traffic control existed before always-on Internet.
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I'm pretty sure air traffic control existed before always-on Internet.
So did telegrams, but try to send one from Western Union when you get a chance and let me know how that goes. I don't know how reliant ATC is on the internet, but I'd guess that the airlines are. So if you can't get your boarding pass, you don't get on the plane.
ATC is switching from radar to GPS at some point. What do you think is going to happen if there's a glitch in the GPS satellites? They won't be able to switch back to radar either. It's called modernization.
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ATMs - or anything else relying on plastic money - were not working either.
So how will some of the A/Cs here - the ones making "moron" comments - cope the next time a major storm hits the area where their parents' basements are and floods them out?
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I think this article is more "OH by the way this happened, and is somewhat interesting" than "THINK OF THE CHILDREN"
Re: Not as bad as Comcast (Score:2)
You added "THINK OF THE CHILDREN". I own a patent on that. What's a good time for my people to stop by?
Umm, backups? (Score:2)
You're talking about a place where the roads are closed for a few months every year -- when they are iced over. Not surprisingly, I don't think backup internet is the biggest concern. It was down for a day, I'm sure everyone survived. Couldn't get a flight out of town -- which airline's computers screwed up last month grounding flights across the continent again?
So every ten years they live without internet access for 24 hours. That's not a concern.
Re:Umm, iced over? (Score:2, Informative)
You got the road part backwards. When the roads are iced over, then its a good time to drive, the problem time is during the spring thaw, when the roads turn to a soupy mess.
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Good point!
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Not just spring thaw, but winter too. Polar vortices, el nino, all screw up the winter road system.
If you want to see this in action, it's well documented on the TV show "Ice Road Truckers". The last few seasons of which have exclusively focused on Canada. It's amazing since most of the driving has been below the arctic circle. Also, be
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But fuck it, you're a god damn anon so you'll never see this reply and you'll always be an asshole....such is the anon way.
Signed,
Anonymous Coward
Monday October 03, 2016
Fiber infrastructure, everywhere. Starting north. (Score:2)
It's a national embarrassment we don't have a proper, high bandwidth, low latency connection to the North. Such should be the price of sovereignty.
Satellite is sold as a viable option, it's not; those are geosync satellites, and they've got huge latency.
Backup? Sure. Primary? No way.
Be nice to see some vision from the PM here; start with the North, extend it to everybody. This is a big country; that makes it expensive - but also very important.
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There's really no reason Canada shouldn't be the world leader in telecommunications. We have the manpower and rationale for tackling the issue, and it would benefit us in so many ways.
And while I'm 100% with you in that northern communities need better internet (and that the PM should lay out some sort of vision for it), having been up north myself and experienced it first-hand, I think you're underestimating just how costly and difficult it is to get internet up there. It's not just a matter of distance,
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I've deployed networks spanning 30,000+ square kilometers. I know it's possible. It's just not possible for private industry to do at a profit.
Hybrid microwave and fiber is of course the best option - but it is a completely feasible undertaking with the technology available today.
Fiber is uniquely well suited to dealing with horrible environmental conditions; in most of the north, a low-cost option for fiber deployment en masse is probably the best option.
We can build a proper supply highway while we're at
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In terms of population Canada actually ranks behind such population centers as Iraq and the Ukraine. One of the largest -- in terms of square miles? Sure, it is right behind Russia. However that is the problem: Canada is #2 in terms of land area, but #38 in terms of population.
Provide service over tens of miles to get thousands of customers? Why not? Provide service over thousands of miles to get tens of customers? Who is going to pay for
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I mentioned having been up north for work. I was on the Ungava Peninsula [wikipedia.org], which is a fraction of the Canadian north. It's 252,000 sq km. There is zero infrastructure out there. When I mean zero, I mean literally zero. It's not much different from much of the north once you step outside of Yellowknife or Whitehorse.
The communities on the Ungava are all on the coast, which in theory would make it easier to deploy (and this applies to much of the north) since you don't actually have to provide 100% covera
Re: Fiber infrastructure, everywhere. Starting nor (Score:2)
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Hmmm, someone speaking there with the confidence that comes with never having had to deal with any of (1) the sea, (2) annual growth of coastal ice, or (3) the gouging of passing icebergs.
Remember the Peterman's iceberg of about 5 years ago? 40 by 80km in dimension, 10-50m above sea-level, and so up to several hundred metres below sea level. That last was really good news to us - it meant that the
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Undersea cables do get cut from time to time. They can be repaired. OMGWTF Icebergs are one possibility. Ships dragging anchors is a more common case. Still a hell of a lot cheaper than cutting a road through the countryside and burying thousands of miles of cable in permafrost.
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Bullshit. As global warming increases in it's effects, the remaining ice will continue to slide downhill into the oceans, where even more icebergs will be calved. It's only when you've heated the Arctic and Antarctic to the extent that none of the glaciers actually reach the sea that you'l lose the hazard of icebergs. Considering that both land masses have considerable areas of steep coastal mountains, that's going to take
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There was a Dilbert cartoon which fits that. The company bid low and won a contract to provide wireless services to some area, then pointy head passed the task of implementing this on to the techs. "how difficult can it be not to have to put up wires"?
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Fiber is uniquely well suited to dealing with horrible environmental conditions; in most of the north, a low-cost option for fiber deployment en masse is probably the best option.
Does any of your network experience involve areas with permafrost? If you don't bury things deep enough in areas with permafrost, it will get sheared by movement from annual freeze/thaw cycle. To avoid that you have to bury it much deeper, but that gets expensive to cut through the permafrost and to make sure there are no problems refreezing. Alternatively, you can have it above the ground, although that requires substantially more structure. Both are solvable, doable approaches and have been done for t
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And the other corollary is that your equipment budget is going to be constrained by the size and weight limits of an Antonov's hold. If it doesn't fit into that, you're not going to get it in. If it does fit, you've then got to look at your runway infrastructure - will it take an Antonov?
Nothing in particular against other heavy-lift aircraft. But the Antonov is the biggest readily available. The
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"It's a national embarrassment"
This Canadian disagrees, and would find a massive federal make-work project for this a national embarrassment.
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Would it still be an embarrassment if we had a capable data infrastructure ready to go when the northwest passage becomes regularly used?
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"Why did satellite Galaxy 4 go off course?" (May 20, 1998)
http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/sp... [cnn.com]
Most nations just buy into one direct to consumer network. Like one phone line, one satellite was seen as enough.
A lot of basic vital infrastructure around the world is just used all day, everyday with no thought to any backup.
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Ellesmere island has around 150 people over 196,235sq km. Giant swaths of the north have absolutely no one living there at all. I haven't checked, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could draw out an area the size of texas with no one living there at all.
Re: Welcome to Canada (Score:3, Interesting)
To put in context. I live in the NWT. It is the size of Texas and California combined. The population is 45k, half of which live in one town.
Location. (Score:3, Informative)
Had to click to the article, and then again to the source to finally find out what area they were talking about, "northern Quebec and Nunavut". You'd think that's interesting information, and a lot better than just "North".
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Yeah. The Yukon and NWT have microwave and fibre hookups as primary, but one you hit Hudson's bay it gets dicey. But even in those territories there are sat only communities.
Curiosity Killed the Cat (Score:2)
sea-fiber + microwave towers = partial fix (Score:1)
For communities relatively close to another community that already has or will soon have a good Internet connection such as from an undersea cable, microwave towers may provide an effective bridge.
This assumes reliable electrical power and the ability to construct tall-enough-to-see-each-other towers at both ends.
The combination of sea-port fiber connections and microwave connections to "nearby" communities should reduce the number of people who rely only on a single satellite connection, but it's not the s
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While towers tall enough for line of sight is ideal, microwave communication can also occur with what is called Tropospheric Scatter. This is a propagation mode where signals are transmitted above the horizon of the receiving station. Some of the energy is reflected by water vapor back to the receiving station completing the link. Troposcatter links can work for a few hundred miles and used to link remote communities such as Nome, Alaska. A troposcatter link was also used to connect West Berlin to West Germ
That's OK (Score:3)
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I remember reading reports of the U.S. Power-Utility companies bitching like hell when they were forced to hook outlying farms to their networks. Of course the numbers involved were completely different.
What ever became of the Teledesic (Score:2)
A few things to keep in mind ... (Score:2)
This is a communications satellite in geostationary orbit. The typical ground station will be using fairly expensive equipment to provide an uplink in addition to a downlink. The ground station will provide internet, telephone, and television services to an entire community via more conventional means (e.g. cable). This is not the type of installation that you have in your home.
The uses go far beyond home internet access. The typical ground station will provide service for local government services and
Anik F2 (Score:2)
Ah yes I remember that thing 1.5Mbps down 256Kbps up and the constant threat of termination if I used too much data
"If you violate the FAP in four consecutive months or at least once in each of five calendar months within any twelve month period â" whether by exceeding the Monthly Usage Threshold or by remaining in a reduced-speed status -- WildBlue may terminate your Customer Agreement."
Yeah I remember that I used it for about 3 years.
Still have the dish pointed and equipment connected.
Every once in a
Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) (Score:2)
"Just as the solar cycle follows a roughly 11-year cycle, so does the GCR, with its maximum, however, coming near solar minimum" link [noaa.gov]
"Highlights of Solar and Geomagnetic Activity 26 September - 02 October 2016 Solar activity was at predominately very low levels" link [noaa.gov]