I'm happy to answer that great question. I can give you a fairly high-level summary. I will be careful. Dean may have to raise the red card if I start going outside the boundaries of an NDA, but let me try. I don't have the best filter, as you will find. I usually just tell you what I'm thinking.
For satellite-served markets, to your point, SpaceX is talking about.... Actually, they are from 47° and they may get up as high as 55° within the next six months. By this time next year, in fact, if they are fortunate with their space-based lasers, they may have the polar regions starting to deliver service.
SpaceX is the unicorn, I would say. It really solves a lot of the problems with broadband connectivity. We have worked in Africa, Indonesia, the South Pacific and every community in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. I was born in one of those small indigenous communities of 800 people. That's where my family business started. That's where SSi started. The Snowshoe Inn is the family business.
SpaceX is going to solve a huge problem by bringing low-latency.... That is not to be lost; it's not to be missed. Latency is a huge aspect. When people talk about geostationary satellites, there is a big latency to get up and down. SpaceX solves that.
Telesat is also talking about a LEO platform, which would be out a few years later. SpaceX, by this time next year, would probably have terminals available. Telesat is talking about three years from now. SES, our newest partners as we just mentioned.... That's a huge deal. I don't think a lot of people recognize it.
I won't go quite as deep. You have current C-band capacity or geostationary capacity. Actually, let me start at fibre, which costs $2 to $10 per megabit per second, depending on where you live. Delivering a couple of megabits—and when we talk 50 down and 10 up, that's not the dedicated bandwidth; that's the burst. That's as far as your car could go. If you look at ISED's own oversubscription guideline, which is 25:1, that really means you divide that 50 down by 25, that's 2 megabits down, so about 0.4 megabits up—2.4 megabit. For fibre, its $2 to $10 a megabit, so your input costs $20 or $25 to service that. That's dark fibre—not lit up, no electronics and no support.
For the cheapest satellite, you're getting into $300 per megabit. You're going to go up from there to about $1,000 a megabit. That's going to give you unlit—the equivalent of dark fibre on the ground. It's $300 to $1,000, compared to $2 to $10. Your input cost, if you have to deliver 2.4 megabits to somebody, and your cost is $1,000 a megabit, it's $2,400 a month for that service to deliver 50 down and 10 up with ISED's 25:1.
Bandwidth prices in satellite-served markets are extremely complicated. Is that going to change? With the new partnership with SES, we started working on that some time ago because there is not enough capacity in space. We've been saying this for five or six years. Over Canada, without significant investment by the federal government to buy capacity, that won't be there.
For the satellite-served market, there is not enough capacity in space and it takes a couple of years to ramp up that capacity. It's very difficult to get ahead of it. When COVID hits, you just have a shortfall.
What are we doing right now, in January? With no federal funding, we committed a significant amount of our investment money—and I say that because my wife is the CFO—into Nunavut to be able to bring net new capacity with SES. That new capacity is being rolled out now and by the end of this month, it will be in place to support Nunavummiut, but there is no funding at this point for that.