Manto Sipi Cree Nation on Manitoba’s Gods River sits nearly 600 km from the provincial capital, and about twice that below the new constellation of satellites that now connects the community’s nursing station and some of its residents to the world and its wide web.

The fibre and cable lines that bring broadband to more southerly population centres are absent here. Residents of these higher latitudes have been linked, if at all, by geostationary satellites, which orbit too far above the Earth’s surface for telemedicine or even regular video calls; the pixels take too long to travel back and forth. 

“The internet capabilities that the southern urban areas enjoy… should be shared within northern communities as well,” said Manto Sipi chief Michael Yellowback. There is demand in the community for streaming services and Zoom meetings, he said, but also the need for emergency links if the phone lines crash.

Manto Sipi is now closer to that connectivity, as one of several sites across the North linked to the low-Earth orbit (LEO) network of OneWeb. The British space telecommunications firm is growing its Canadian presence even as the country’s domestic champion struggles to take off.

Founded in 2012, the London-headquartered company is one of several launching hundreds of LEO satellites to get businesses and browsers online. Circumnavigating the planet much closer to the surface than their conventional geostationary counterparts, they promise faster internet speeds and more bandwidth. 

OneWeb now has 542 of its planned 648 satellites in orbit. The company acts as a wholesaler,  selling bandwidth to integrators who connect business clients or to internet service providers (ISPs) who link up consumers. By early May 2022, OneWeb was taking commercial orders here, offering service “anywhere north of the 50th parallel,” said Howard Stanley, the firm’s Ottawa-based vice-president for the Americas.

Canada occupies a huge landmass, but much of the population is massed along its bottom border. Telecom executives have noted that geography has made it challenging to link northern communities with fibre lines. But those features also make the country opportune for OneWeb, which is working its way down from the top of the world. “Canada, by just default, is a world leader in LEO right now,” noted Stanley. 

The OneWeb constellation was connected to modem-like terminals at over 70 sites in this country as of mid-January. That could eventually grow to “thousands, if not tens of thousands,” Stanley said. “If you start looking at just the amount of distance between major cities and the cellular and road infrastructure, rail, trains, pipelines—there’s lots of things that aren’t really adequately connected today.”

Many of the end users connected to OneWeb’s satellites are businesses. They include mining companies that need to get their site offices and equipment online but also “provide basic morale services like web browsing, Netflix, Facetime” to crews stationed on two-week rotations, Stanley said. 

Whitehorse-headquartered Northwestel is plugging OneWeb into its existing network for 10 communities in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and northern British Columbia. The LEO linkup replaces an existing connection to a fading geostationary satellite. “On the consumer broadband side, the need is being driven by just lack of available capacity,” said Stanley.

Take Manto Sipi. Winnipeg-based Broadband Communications North (BCN) named it as a test site for its OneWeb link in October. The firm and Ottawa-based partner Rock Networks eventually plan to bring the service to 18 satellite-only communities. BCN, an Indigenous-controlled non-profit ISP, typically connects the local school, health centre, band office and RCMP detachment, said executive director Jason Neepin. 

In Manto Sipi, BCN swapped the OneWeb network in for an existing Telesat C-band satellite link, which now serves as a backup. But connecting to the constellation is only a first step. Neepin said only about a fifth of the houses in the 809-person community have the hardware necessary to use consumer broadband service. (Yellowback said some residents also use Starlink, SpaceX’s LEO-based direct-to-consumer dish service). 

BCN has sought federal funding to expand its LEO-based service. While OneWeb has given the ISP a discounted rate for its Northern Manitoba deployment, it’s “really expensive,” said Neepin. Still, the extra bandwidth will readily find users. “Our customers are demanding this and the chiefs are very upset at the poor connectivity in these communities,” he said. “I’m trying to find a solution now.”

Ottawa has budgeted billions to expand broadband access country-wide. It has also tacitly picked a preferred LEO provider, and it’s not already-operational OneWeb. Canadian governments have pledged $1.84 billion to finance Telesat’s US$5.5-billion Lightspeed constellation, and another $709 million to subsidize capacity on the network for ISPs. But the Ottawa-based firm has as of yet only launched a single test LEO satellite, of the 188 that it eventually hopes to have up. It has yet to secure all the financing it needs to build the rest.

LEO constellations are extremely expensive to get in the air. In March 2020, OneWeb filed for bankruptcy protection after launching 74 satellites and raising US$4.49 billion, according to PitchBook data. Since the company emerged from credit protection, New Delhi-based Bharti Enterprises has become its largest shareholder, with the U.K. government and SoftBank also holding significant stakes. In July 2022, OneWeb announced it would merge with Paris-based Eutelsat, combining LEO- and geostationary-focused businesses, respectively.

The prospect of subsidized Telesat Lightspeed service hasn’t cost OneWeb customers, according to Stanley. Some clients, he noted, are already using OneWeb’s LEO service alongside Telesat’s current C-band offering to improve the resilience of their networks. “Choosing one does not mean you can’t choose the other,” he said.

OneWeb is working with partners who have applied to Ottawa’s $3.23-billion Universal Broadband Fund, although it declined to disclose how many, or how much bandwidth it has available. Last year, the firm lobbied staff in the offices of Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Rural Economic Development Minister Gudie Hutchings on a combined three occasions.  

Stanley said the firm is “not overly dependent on the public purse,” but wants to ensure officials are aware of its network as it starts to fill up. “We’re attempting to sell our service,” he said. “As much as I’d love to have 100 per cent of it go to connect people’s homes, the reality is if there’s a mine site nearby, they may purchase the capacity.”