Industry Committee on Nov. 17th, 2020

[Derek Sloan, Conservative, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Could I cut you off there? I'm sorry, but I want to get in one question for Ms. Cooper.

Ms. Cooper, will any direct jobs be brought to Canada through Starlink, through any satellites being built here or in any type of installation with your services? Could you comment on that briefly?

[Patricia Cooper]

The satellites are being made by us in the United States, and they'll be launched by us out of the United States, but we do aim to provide and install and operate gateways throughout Canada, which would be network equipment where consumer signals are aggregated. They sit on good fibre. We would have leases with local landholders and also pay fibre operators for their connectivity. Right now we're not approved for those gateways, so at this point in the early stages of our beta, those installations are in the U.S.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to MP Jowhari.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thanks to both witnesses. It's quite an informative session.

My colleagues talked about accessibility, affordability, speed, reliability, quality, resilience and scalability. Both witnesses talked about the number of satellites they're going to launch.

A question for me, more on the technical side, is how we are going to position all these satellites in the low orbit. When you were talking about the satellites, Mr. Goldberg, you mentioned that the 220 satellites and the 78 satellites are going to be on a higher latitude than where SpaceX is putting them. I'm looking at SpaceX talking about 4,400 satellites. Nine hundred of them are already in place. We are talking about 300 satellites. We're talking about Amazon, Russia and China putting all these satellites in low orbit.

Tell me from a technical point of view how all these satellites are going to be hovering around. I know you're moving into a polar orbit satellite to cover what you call mid-50°N and up. How are all these things going to be there? How do you guys plan to put this in and inform each other and make sure there are no collisions?

[Patricia Cooper]

I'd be happy to take that.

First, I'll say that SpaceX takes space safety really seriously, not only because we're a technology company and we like to solve puzzles and make sure that we invent new things, but also because we have the responsibility of carrying people—astronauts—through space. That's the highest level of responsibility, so we certainly care about this issue very deeply.

There are a couple of elements to what you asked about. One of them is the physical space. How do you keep the satellites from colliding? How do you make sure they don't run into each other? That's an important element of space safety for sure. That's done first with some planning on where the satellites are. It's often said that space is big and there are a lot of different altitudes. There are, I think, 600 kilometres between where Telesat satellites will orbit and where SpaceX's are. Satellites in plane are also quite far from each other even within their own constellation, so there's a fair amount of distance between the spacecraft in space.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Does that mean countries and companies come together and agree that this is the altitude they're going to? Is it an honour system whereby someone can say what the most efficient altitude for them is and therefore, they're going to put it there and then everyone is going to go for that altitude?

[Patricia Cooper]

There is an international registry where you file for your orbital planes and your altitudes and your frequencies.

I think this wave of LEO constellations is certainly just at the very beginning, and increasingly those negotiations and coordinations are happening. For example, I think that we are the first company to do an automated collision avoidance system, in which we take data from a database of where everything is and the satellites automatically manoeuvre around those. Part of it has to do with making sure your satellites are competent and can move if you find something. Another part is making sure we're improving the fidelity of what we know of what's in space, in orbit.

These are all the pieces of this really complicated study, but I can tell you right now that we all want the environment to be able to allow other—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you. I really appreciate that.

I have a minute and I want to go to Mr. Goldberg.

Mr. Goldberg, you talked about repurposing that mid-band spectrum. You talked about the fact that that has happened in the U.S. and that it's benefiting them greatly. I'm sure SpaceX is using that. You touched on it, but can you expand on that one? What is it specifically that needs to get done for us to be able to open up that spectrum?

[Daniel Goldberg]

What needs to get done is that, right now, we're using the spectrum for all these different things that I've described. We've been using it for 50 years. In order for it to be made available for 5G, we have to literally clear the spectrum. That means taking all the users that are currently using it—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

What do we do with them? Where do we move them?

[Daniel Goldberg]

We're going to move them to LEO. We're going to repack them on some of our other satellites. It's very expensive. It's very complicated, but we have a plan to get it done.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to our third round of questions.

The first round goes to MP Dreeshen.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

It's certainly nice to hear from both Telesat and SpaceX. I was fortunate enough to be with this committee when we went to Washington back in 2017. The discussion there was a Senate hearing on rural and remote broadband. SpaceX was there telling us what we could expect for LEOs in the future. It's great to see that it has finally come full circle. Yes, it does take a while for all of this technology to be there for consumers. I think that's really a significant thing that we should all recognize.

There was discussion earlier about Amazon, OneWeb in the U.K., and also China and Russia and basically looking at the strategic economic plans that we see.

What type of security protocols are required in order to make sure that the satellite array that you have can function without concerns about other actors?

[Patricia Cooper]

Securities—

Go ahead, Dan.

[Daniel Goldberg]

No, you go ahead, and then I'll follow.

[Patricia Cooper]

Okay.

I was just going to say that I think security is especially important not just for our consumers' data, which is a high priority for any communications provider, but also for the operation of our satellites. We have encrypted our signals and we have an enormous amount of reliability and redundancy built into our system for that security and we are operating these at the highest level of best practices.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Mr. Goldberg.

[Daniel Goldberg]

We've been doing this for 50 years, carrying consumer traffic, government traffic and enterprise traffic. We've always taken that very seriously. We've hardened our systems both in terms of flying our satellites and with respect to all of the data that comes. The reality is that these LEO systems are probably even more robust and more resilient than the geostationary satellites are. There are just a lot more of them, so from an enemy's perspective, trying to block their transmissions or trying to hack into them becomes much, much more complicated.

I think that's true for both Telesat and SpaceX. We're both doing quite a bit of work with the U.S. government, which is placing great hopes on the opportunities to use these LEO constellations. As you can imagine, the U.S. government user has rigorous security protocols that we all need to comply with if we want to carry their content.

We've been doing it for years. I think we actually have even more of the upper hand with these much more distributed, proliferated LEO constellations.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Thank you.

When we were in Washington, one of the discussions we had was about the stranded assets that are there from existing telecom companies. There have been billions of dollars put into their networks and into the processes that are there. They want to be able to use that and sometimes it becomes a bit of a barrier to moving forward. Is there a degree of co-operation that you feel will be necessary for them to be able to use the satellite system versus some of the other functioning that they have?

Perhaps, Telesat, you might be best able to describe that because you deal with those particular operators.

[Daniel Goldberg]

Listen. We're living the dream right now where we continue to operate assets that we launched in some cases over a decade ago and are now bringing on this multi-billion dollar capability which in all likelihood will disrupt potentially some of the investments that we made before. We always tell ourselves that we're much more focused on cannibalizing what we do than allowing somebody else to come along and do it. To some extent, these different assets are complementary with one and other and they can reinforce each other. To some extent they're competitive and I suspect like in other industries there will be some winners and some losers, which is why we're running as fast as we can at Telesat to make sure that we're on the right side of that equation.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Does Starlink have similar concerns?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Unfortunately, Mr. Dreeshen, that's all your time.

I will now turn to MP Lambropoulos.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My first question is for Mr. Goldberg, from Telesat.

Last year, you signed a contract with the Government of Canada, which will spend $600 million on your infrastructure to significantly improve high-speed Internet coverage across Canada.

Are the new satellites ready yet? If not, when will they be ready? The aim is to bring high-speed Internet access to Canadians who are still without it.

My apologies if someone has already asked that. I had to step out of the meeting for about a half-hour, so I missed some of the discussion.

[Daniel Goldberg]

Thank you for your question.

I'm going to answer in English.

My French isn't good enough.

I did speak about this a little bit. It's less an investment in Telesat or our project. It's more of a commitment to take a very low-cost capacity on the constellation that we'll make available to users over the next 10 years at a very low cost.

I mentioned that we expect to start building these satellites in the coming months. My expectation is that the satellites will be built in Canada. My expectation is that they're going to be built in Quebec. We'll start our own beta testing in about two years' time and we'll be providing service, frankly, starting off in the upper latitudes in 2023.