6 ms·

Huawei heats up the battle for internet in Canada's north

52 points by LyalinDotCom 7y ago

hackertldr 7y ago
Here's a tl;dr I made that reduces text by 92%. (I'm a bot) AFP Huawei says it wants to bring high-speed internet to Canada's north. "There's a real battle right now about where government investment is going - there's a lot of money up for grabs," says Laura Tribe, the executive director for internet advocacy group OpenMedia. Huawei Canada announced in July that it will be partnering with local telecommunications companies ICE Wireless and Iristel to expand satellite coverage to 70 communities in the north. Floating just 2,000km above the planet, low-Earth orbit satellites provide much faster internet than older-technology satellites, like the one Huawei will use in the north.
fouc 7y ago
Canada really needs to start developing the north properly, what with global warming and all.
- grecy 7y ago
  Ontario transfers $1 billion a year to the Yukon for exactly the kind of Development you're talking about. It's growing and expanding just as the government wants it to.
  - dear 7y ago
    Better not use that $1B to buy Huawei stuff.
    - aclsid 7y ago
      Why? I'm honestly bothered by this Cold War mentality that has settled in people due to the amount of repetition that Huawei somehow is doing something bad yet no single piece of evidence has come out to support those claims. Restricting competition by using FUD is nothing new to the Linux community, but seeing this being done at the govt level and people buying into this whole tribal mentality is astonishing. I have more issues with some monopolistic tendencies that companies like Google or Microsoft in the 90s had, especially with how Android is effectively becoming closed source through the Play Store and Services, yet you do not see that level of collective paranoia going on.
      - dear 7y ago
        >Why? I'm honestly bothered by this Cold War mentality... You should direct this question to China instead.
  - jeromegv 7y ago
    You mean Ottawa? Because the province of Ontario is not contributing to the territory of Yukon.
    - anewguy9000 7y ago
      Equalization payments: "do not, technically, involve wealthy provinces making payments to poor provinces, although in practice this is what happens, via the federal treasury." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments
      - peeters 7y ago
        This is NOT in practice what happens. This way of framing it is popular by separatist segments in Alberta, but it's bullshit. Transfer payments come out of federal tax levies. No province is being targeted for levies. If one province has richer people and thus pay more in federal tax, then yes they will likely have a net loss in transfer payments. But this is no different than ANY federal service, whether it comes to military bases, natural resources, child care benefits, etc. It's simply how taxes work. If you're a poor person in Alberta you're paying less into equalization than a rich person in Quebec.
        rdlecler1 7y ago
        Except that Quebec has additional social services that are being paid for by these levies. Child care for example. Also revenue from high income taxes often come with increased prices for residents so while two people may pay similar taxes between the provinces they can have vastly different standards of living. Not unlike here in SF where you can easily pay $35k/year in taxes and you’re barely getting by while people in other cities are paying far less taxes and they own their own homes.
        sdfasdfsafasf 7y ago
        That's exactly what happens via the unequal distribution of federal income to the provinces. We can argue that it's a good thing the program works the way it does and I'd argue, for the most part, that's true [0]. But all the programs you listed and the eq. program are net transfers from rich (and less politically powerful [1]) to poorer provinces. It's akin to when coastal Americans bemoan that fly over Americans get net transfer of wealth from them. [0]having lived in many US states, I kinda like knowing that NL, or NB is taken care of when they're in the dumps [1] Being a 905er myself, let's be honest here! Quebec, between separatism and as a battleground province, can throw a hissy fit and get whatever they want (and good for them! Hate the game, not the player.)
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  Yes, I think the "heats up" in the title was very inappropriate. The humanity will likely collapse within 10 years and all we worry about is our internet speeds.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ttraub 7y ago
    Don't you mean "appropriate"? If global climate is heating up, people will naturally move northwards in Canada and Siberia to take advantage of newly fertile farmland and moderate temps.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      > people will naturally move northwards in Canada and Siberia to take advantage of newly fertile farmland Is this the early 1900's? Farming these days doesn't require a large population - the day of family farms are few and far between. You need comparatively few people to farm an extraordinarily large area of land, so I can't see a reason why people would want to all move there for an industry they largely won't take part in. I also doubt the moderate temperatures bit - while the average temperature will go up it will be subject to all sorts of radical weather, made more extreme by the atmospheres additional energy, and without the oceans to try and mitigate the temperature. I'm sure there will still be cold winters - moving the dial up an average of 5 C still sees the average January Fort McMurray day with a high of -5 C and a low of -17 C.
      - freeone3000 7y ago
        Also, Fort McMurray isn't North - it's 10 degrees latitude south and twenty degrees C warmer than Ilaquit.
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        That too - people think of the oil being in the "north", but it's not, if you look at the map, it's only a 3rd of the way north of the US/Canada border.
- frenchyatwork 7y ago
  A lot of our north is what is known as the Canadian Shield. It's very bad to develop on, and global warming will only do a little bit to improve that.
  - stallmanite 7y ago
    I just read the Wikipedia article on the Canadian Shield but it’s not immediately obvious to me why it would be bad to develop on. Is it the thin topsoil basically?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
m23khan 7y ago
I am sorry but as Canadian, I don't see much point of development in Canada's North. That part of Country is simply unsustainable for human settlement and whatever is there currently is on back off massive amount of investment in infrastructure, logistic and construction. Even basics such as milk has to be imported from other parts of Canada 1000s of kilometers away. Don't get me wrong - I applaud folks who have to live there but there simply is no point of encouraging people to stay living there or worse, to move there. Coming back to the topic - Huawei aside, say Canadian Govt./some corporation decides to spend billion dollars to lay down required infrastructure to kick off high speed internet services in that part of Canada - do you even think they have the population to support their project financially? Sooner or later, tax payers will be on hook (that is how it works in Canada) to pay for some Yukon based teenager's right to surf youtube on high speed internet.
- petermcneeley 7y ago
  A significant portion of Canada's wealth comes from the north and afaik settlement is required it retain claim over this territory.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    Because the High Arctic relocation was so beneficial... (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_relocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_relocation if you're not familiar with this event in Canada's history).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    > A significant portion of Canada's wealth comes from the north What do you mean by that? What natural resources are you referring to?
    - godelski 7y ago
      Oil
rshnotsecure 7y ago
Has anyone asked why in the Linux Kernel there has been an extraordinary amount of work on Huawei in a few key networking files? In fact in such file the changelog since 2016 mentions Huawei more than any other proper noun combined. The person who is in charge of this module...runs two small sites. One is a foundation he created help with overpopulation. The other is a 9/11 was an inside American job website. Here is the module. If you search the forum you will find 4,800 mentions of Huawei. The term Cisco brings up 7 mentions. Netgear only 60. Ridiculous purely in terms of vendor favoritism. EDIT: link - http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/ http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  I wonder if it's just the same issue as HTC since it had so many networking bugs that it required much more code to make it work.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  How likely is it just that Huawei devices are the most common that use the usb modeswitch technique? I've gotten 3 different "free" 3g/4g wifi routers (all rebranded to the ISPs name) and they were all Huawei. ZTE is also extremely popular but it's too short to search for. Other vendors like d-link, tp-link, alcatel, novatel, qualcomm etc all turn up around 300 results each.
Scoundreller 7y ago
If Huawei really wanted to drum up Canadian support, they would make claims that their technology will drive down mobile data prices in Canada. If there’s a group that’s Canadians universally dread, it’s their telecoms. They should latch onto that. 5G is pointless tech in Canada: we have tons of excess capacity because telecoms can charge so much. Being able to go through my 4gb/month that I pay $40+/month for (long dead deal) in 7 minutes is not valuable to me. But Huawei really fears pissing off the telecom oligopoly. We pay some of the highest rates in the world, even in highly populated areas.
- AFascistWorld 7y ago
  Equipment and phone makers need new "Gs" to sell more products, 5G overall is pointless. 5G may never be commercially viable in Canada.
- windsurfer 7y ago
  FYI the freedom/wind mobile "Holiday Miracle" plan is now basically available when you get the 2GB plan since they now give you +3GB as "bonus" for only $40/month, but you are required to sign up for a new plan.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  > We pay some of the highest rates in the world, even in highly populated areas. It's a misconception that sparsely populated areas are more expensive to cover than highly-populated ones. That's actually the opposite, it's much easier to cover a highway than a dense city center.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Per square km, definitely. But I agree, there's also a sweet-spot in the middle for cost/subscriber. All those pesky walls of concrete really get in the way of radiation. Then there's the wide fresnel zones and low bandwidth of the higher-wavelength better-penetrating frequencies.
walrus01 7y ago
Huawei has nothing to do with the OSI layer 1 challenges of getting access to communities currently dependent on geostationary satellite based access. Lower cost to launch satellites will help. Starlink, Kuiper and Oneweb will help greatly, assuming that all three get built and put into production use. For many places the present economics of construction, and going at least 15-20 years into the future, there will be no terrestrial PTP microwave link to southern Canada nor will there be a cost effective way to link these communities by fiber. They'll remain dependent on some form of satellite access for a WAN uplink to the rest of the world. We do not need Huawei to build robust last mile wireless point to point and point-to-multipoint radio access networks in these communities. Lots of good non-LTE and LTE-based solutions exist for PtMP radio systems in bands from 600 MHz to 5.8 GHz. Huawei marketing and sales trying to say that Canada "needs" Huawei to develop 4G/LTE and 5G services in arctic communities is just silly. There's tons of good equipment vendor alternatives with platforms that are just as fast for PtMP last mile systems.

52 points by LyalinDotCom 7y ago

Here's a tl;dr I made that reduces text by 92%. (I'm a bot) AFP Huawei says it wants to bring high-speed internet to Canada's north. "There's a real battle right now about where government investment is going - there's a lot of money up for grabs," says Laura Tribe, the executive director for internet advocacy group OpenMedia. Huawei Canada announced in July that it will be partnering with local telecommunications companies ICE Wireless and Iristel to expand satellite coverage to 70 communities in the north. Floating just 2,000km above the planet, low-Earth orbit satellites provide much faster internet than older-technology satellites, like the one Huawei will use in the north.

fouc 7y ago

Canada really needs to start developing the north properly, what with global warming and all.

grecy 7y ago
Ontario transfers $1 billion a year to the Yukon for exactly the kind of Development you're talking about. It's growing and expanding just as the government wants it to.
- dear 7y ago
  Better not use that $1B to buy Huawei stuff.
  - aclsid 7y ago
    Why? I'm honestly bothered by this Cold War mentality that has settled in people due to the amount of repetition that Huawei somehow is doing something bad yet no single piece of evidence has come out to support those claims. Restricting competition by using FUD is nothing new to the Linux community, but seeing this being done at the govt level and people buying into this whole tribal mentality is astonishing. I have more issues with some monopolistic tendencies that companies like Google or Microsoft in the 90s had, especially with how Android is effectively becoming closed source through the Play Store and Services, yet you do not see that level of collective paranoia going on.
    - dear 7y ago
      >Why? I'm honestly bothered by this Cold War mentality... You should direct this question to China instead.
- jeromegv 7y ago
  You mean Ottawa? Because the province of Ontario is not contributing to the territory of Yukon.
  - anewguy9000 7y ago
    Equalization payments: "do not, technically, involve wealthy provinces making payments to poor provinces, although in practice this is what happens, via the federal treasury." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments
    - peeters 7y ago
      This is NOT in practice what happens. This way of framing it is popular by separatist segments in Alberta, but it's bullshit. Transfer payments come out of federal tax levies. No province is being targeted for levies. If one province has richer people and thus pay more in federal tax, then yes they will likely have a net loss in transfer payments. But this is no different than ANY federal service, whether it comes to military bases, natural resources, child care benefits, etc. It's simply how taxes work. If you're a poor person in Alberta you're paying less into equalization than a rich person in Quebec.
      - rdlecler1 7y ago
        Except that Quebec has additional social services that are being paid for by these levies. Child care for example. Also revenue from high income taxes often come with increased prices for residents so while two people may pay similar taxes between the provinces they can have vastly different standards of living. Not unlike here in SF where you can easily pay $35k/year in taxes and you’re barely getting by while people in other cities are paying far less taxes and they own their own homes.
      - sdfasdfsafasf 7y ago
        That's exactly what happens via the unequal distribution of federal income to the provinces. We can argue that it's a good thing the program works the way it does and I'd argue, for the most part, that's true [0]. But all the programs you listed and the eq. program are net transfers from rich (and less politically powerful [1]) to poorer provinces. It's akin to when coastal Americans bemoan that fly over Americans get net transfer of wealth from them. [0]having lived in many US states, I kinda like knowing that NL, or NB is taken care of when they're in the dumps [1] Being a 905er myself, let's be honest here! Quebec, between separatism and as a battleground province, can throw a hissy fit and get whatever they want (and good for them! Hate the game, not the player.)
skocznymroczny 7y ago
Yes, I think the "heats up" in the title was very inappropriate. The humanity will likely collapse within 10 years and all we worry about is our internet speeds.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ttraub 7y ago
  Don't you mean "appropriate"? If global climate is heating up, people will naturally move northwards in Canada and Siberia to take advantage of newly fertile farmland and moderate temps.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    > people will naturally move northwards in Canada and Siberia to take advantage of newly fertile farmland Is this the early 1900's? Farming these days doesn't require a large population - the day of family farms are few and far between. You need comparatively few people to farm an extraordinarily large area of land, so I can't see a reason why people would want to all move there for an industry they largely won't take part in. I also doubt the moderate temperatures bit - while the average temperature will go up it will be subject to all sorts of radical weather, made more extreme by the atmospheres additional energy, and without the oceans to try and mitigate the temperature. I'm sure there will still be cold winters - moving the dial up an average of 5 C still sees the average January Fort McMurray day with a high of -5 C and a low of -17 C.
    - freeone3000 7y ago
      Also, Fort McMurray isn't North - it's 10 degrees latitude south and twenty degrees C warmer than Ilaquit.
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        That too - people think of the oil being in the "north", but it's not, if you look at the map, it's only a 3rd of the way north of the US/Canada border.
frenchyatwork 7y ago
A lot of our north is what is known as the Canadian Shield. It's very bad to develop on, and global warming will only do a little bit to improve that.
- stallmanite 7y ago
  I just read the Wikipedia article on the Canadian Shield but it’s not immediately obvious to me why it would be bad to develop on. Is it the thin topsoil basically?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

m23khan 7y ago

I am sorry but as Canadian, I don't see much point of development in Canada's North. That part of Country is simply unsustainable for human settlement and whatever is there currently is on back off massive amount of investment in infrastructure, logistic and construction. Even basics such as milk has to be imported from other parts of Canada 1000s of kilometers away. Don't get me wrong - I applaud folks who have to live there but there simply is no point of encouraging people to stay living there or worse, to move there. Coming back to the topic - Huawei aside, say Canadian Govt./some corporation decides to spend billion dollars to lay down required infrastructure to kick off high speed internet services in that part of Canada - do you even think they have the population to support their project financially? Sooner or later, tax payers will be on hook (that is how it works in Canada) to pay for some Yukon based teenager's right to surf youtube on high speed internet.

petermcneeley 7y ago
A significant portion of Canada's wealth comes from the north and afaik settlement is required it retain claim over this territory.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Because the High Arctic relocation was so beneficial... (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_relocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_relocation if you're not familiar with this event in Canada's history).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  > A significant portion of Canada's wealth comes from the north What do you mean by that? What natural resources are you referring to?
  - godelski 7y ago
    Oil

rshnotsecure 7y ago

Has anyone asked why in the Linux Kernel there has been an extraordinary amount of work on Huawei in a few key networking files? In fact in such file the changelog since 2016 mentions Huawei more than any other proper noun combined. The person who is in charge of this module...runs two small sites. One is a foundation he created help with overpopulation. The other is a 9/11 was an inside American job website. Here is the module. If you search the forum you will find 4,800 mentions of Huawei. The term Cisco brings up 7 mentions. Netgear only 60. Ridiculous purely in terms of vendor favoritism. EDIT: link - http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/ http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/

WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
I wonder if it's just the same issue as HTC since it had so many networking bugs that it required much more code to make it work.
kalleboo 7y ago
How likely is it just that Huawei devices are the most common that use the usb modeswitch technique? I've gotten 3 different "free" 3g/4g wifi routers (all rebranded to the ISPs name) and they were all Huawei. ZTE is also extremely popular but it's too short to search for. Other vendors like d-link, tp-link, alcatel, novatel, qualcomm etc all turn up around 300 results each.

Scoundreller 7y ago

If Huawei really wanted to drum up Canadian support, they would make claims that their technology will drive down mobile data prices in Canada. If there’s a group that’s Canadians universally dread, it’s their telecoms. They should latch onto that. 5G is pointless tech in Canada: we have tons of excess capacity because telecoms can charge so much. Being able to go through my 4gb/month that I pay $40+/month for (long dead deal) in 7 minutes is not valuable to me. But Huawei really fears pissing off the telecom oligopoly. We pay some of the highest rates in the world, even in highly populated areas.

AFascistWorld 7y ago
Equipment and phone makers need new "Gs" to sell more products, 5G overall is pointless. 5G may never be commercially viable in Canada.
windsurfer 7y ago
FYI the freedom/wind mobile "Holiday Miracle" plan is now basically available when you get the 2GB plan since they now give you +3GB as "bonus" for only $40/month, but you are required to sign up for a new plan.
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
> We pay some of the highest rates in the world, even in highly populated areas. It's a misconception that sparsely populated areas are more expensive to cover than highly-populated ones. That's actually the opposite, it's much easier to cover a highway than a dense city center.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Per square km, definitely. But I agree, there's also a sweet-spot in the middle for cost/subscriber. All those pesky walls of concrete really get in the way of radiation. Then there's the wide fresnel zones and low bandwidth of the higher-wavelength better-penetrating frequencies.

walrus01 7y ago

Huawei has nothing to do with the OSI layer 1 challenges of getting access to communities currently dependent on geostationary satellite based access. Lower cost to launch satellites will help. Starlink, Kuiper and Oneweb will help greatly, assuming that all three get built and put into production use. For many places the present economics of construction, and going at least 15-20 years into the future, there will be no terrestrial PTP microwave link to southern Canada nor will there be a cost effective way to link these communities by fiber. They'll remain dependent on some form of satellite access for a WAN uplink to the rest of the world. We do not need Huawei to build robust last mile wireless point to point and point-to-multipoint radio access networks in these communities. Lots of good non-LTE and LTE-based solutions exist for PtMP radio systems in bands from 600 MHz to 5.8 GHz. Huawei marketing and sales trying to say that Canada "needs" Huawei to develop 4G/LTE and 5G services in arctic communities is just silly. There's tons of good equipment vendor alternatives with platforms that are just as fast for PtMP last mile systems.