In the commercial satellite industry, the satellites themselves are owned by individual companies. We own 12 satellites, and our competitors, as I mentioned, have much larger fleets. In order to actually have the satellite in space, a company like ours needs to go to a country, an administration, and seek to make use of an orbital location and certain frequencies at the orbital location. So in the case of Telesat, of our 12 satellites, eight of them are operating from Canadian-licensed orbital positions. In this case, it is licensed to Telesat by Industry Canada.
The satellite itself has certain active transmitters on it called transponders. A typical satellite, the kind of satellite that we provide to ExpressVu or Shaw Direct, for instance, tends to have approximately 32 individual transponders on them, and we lease the capacity on these transponders. We provide a service using these transponders to many different companies around the world.
Today, about 54% of our revenue is coming from customers located here in Canada. Unfortunately for us, we still have more available capacity to sell. So if Astral or other Canadian users desire to have more of our satellite capacity, we are delighted to receive their calls and make more capacity available to them.
If our satellites become full, if the utilization becomes very high, we then meet with all of our customers and prospective customers and try to persuade them to help us launch a new satellite. I mentioned that I expect at the end of this month we will announce that we will be building a new satellite. This new satellite will be principally for Shaw Direct, which would give them more capacity to help Canadian broadcasters get greater distribution throughout Canada. We also expect this satellite will have other services as well. We expect it to have some capacity that the Canadian government could use, for instance. We expect it to have some satellite capacity that will be used by our customers in Latin America to bring basic telecommunications services to very remote areas in Brazil and Colombia, which is a growing part of our business.
Today with our satellites we do have more capacity for Canadian users, we do have more capacity for other users, and we are always looking. We have a sales and marketing department that does nothing but try to meet with our Canadian customers and our other customers around the world to sell them more capacity. I should also say that our competitors are also meeting with all of our customers trying to sell them their satellite capacity. So it's a competitive market.