- Telesat has a deal with Northwestel, a service provider in Northern Canada
- The Canadian government is subsidizing Telesat and ISPs to improve broadband in rural areas
- Telesat plans to have its commercial LEO constellation available in the first quarter of 2028
Telesat is lining itself up to provide low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite backhaul to remote regions of Canada. Of course, it needs to actually deploy its LEO constellation, first.
Telesat has a deal with Northwestel, a service provider in Northern Canada, in which Northwestel has signed a multi-year contract for Telesat’s Lightspeed LEO services to help backhaul fiber in remote communities.
Northwestel already serves many Northern Canada communities with fixed wireless access (FWA), where it installs a tower in a community to provide Wi-Fi to people’s homes. And it backhauls that tower with a geostationary-Earth-orbit (GEO) satellite. But when Telesat’s Lightspeed service is available, Northwestel will be able to backhaul its service with LEO, providing a much faster broadband experience.
Telesat is doing this work with Northwestel as part of an agreement with the government of Canada, in which it will provide a certain amount of satellite capacity to help subsidize rural ISPs who are serving Canada’s remote regions.
Going commercial in Q1 2028
At this point, Telesat has only launched a couple of LEO test satellites.
Glenn Katz, chief commercial officer with Telesat, said the company plans to launch its first two production satellites at the end of this year. And it will begin testing those satellites along with all its ground systems, user terminals and software. “Then, we will start launching the rest of our constellation every couple to three weeks, starting in the middle of 2027,” said Katz. “And those satellites will go into orbit 15 at a time. When the majority of those satellites are in place, we’ll have commercial global service at the end of Q1 2028.”
Ultimately, Telesat is aiming for 150 LEO satellites in orbit by the end of 2027.
Fierce asked if Telesat will be focusing its LEO constellation in the Northern Polar region, given Canada’s latitudes.For comparison, the majority of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites orbit above more populated regions, and Amazon Leo has already said it will focus first on latitude bands in the northern and southern hemispheres where its ground infrastructure is installed and operational.
Katz said Telesat plans to launch full global coverage for its LEO satellite network from inception.
“One of our original requirements was that we would have Polar coverage, and that has to do with the fact that we're Canadian, and we're in the Polar area, and the Polar requirements of the government,” said Katz. “And clearly, the Canadian government is a large supporter of ours.”
He added that Polar coverage, “is super strategic for us, and that was one of our number one design requirements.”
Multi-orbit
SES/Intelsat is both a GEO operator as well as a medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) operator. And it leverages both those constellations to offer multi-orbit connectivity, which combines orbits to offer the best characteristics of each for any particular use case.
When Telesat has its LEO constellation in place in Q1 2028, it could theoretically offer its own multi-orbit connectivity.
But Katz said, “We're not going to provide a multi-orbit service. We are a carrier’s carrier. We sell to the telcos and the mobile operators, and we say to them, ‘If you want to buy some GEO capacity from us or from somebody else, and you want to combine that in a network or solution with our Lightspeed, have at it. But we're not putting it together and then selling it as a package.”
He said the main reason Telesat doesn’t put end-user offers together is that “we don’t want to create channel conflicts.”
Serving the telecom community
Katz said, “What does it mean to be a carrier's carrier? What that means is we're not going to compete with our customers.”
Telesat’s network, in its simplest form, is an extension of a telco’s Layer 2, Carrier Ethernet, Katz said. “So, if they're driving fiber with Carrier Ethernet, but they can't get someplace because geographically or financially, it doesn't make sense, we connect into that. So, we've created basically a telco in space.”
He said Telesat follows MEF’s standards for Carrier Ethernet and interoperability.