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

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

#31

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…

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.

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

#32

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 i…

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.

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

#33
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.

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

#34
post #11

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 l…

I would highly encourage you to read [1] to get a better sense of the potential available in the North. The arctic is estimated to have over 22% of the world's oil and gas reserve [2]. Around 10-12% of the world's population is dependent on fisheries and aquacultures for their livelihood [3], so naturally, as fisheries become depleted in other parts of the world [4], the value of Northern fish stock (especially wild…

There's no infrastructure in the Arctic North, which means anyone seeking to exploit mineral bounties has to be willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to build the infrastructure to export it.

The Yukon and Northwest Territories, with relatively easy access to the passable infrastructure of the Alaska Highway. Yet the cost of mining operations in these areas has caused most of the operations to close down. Similarly, a lot of the Siberian mining operations shut down when the Soviet Union's collapse meant that it could no longer afford the subsidies needed to keep the remote outposts running.

I don't expect the mineral wealth to be economically exploitable anytime soon (this century), and the sovereignty of Canada over its Arctic archipelago and Denmark over Greenland are quite secure, unlike the potential for bounties in marine domains, where the international boundaries and rights are far less clear.

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

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant portion of Canada's wealth comes from the north and afaik settlement is required it retain claim over this territory.

> A significant portion of Canada's wealth comes from the north What do you mean by that? What natural resources are you referring to?

Oil

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

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A significant portion of Canada's wealth comes from the north What do you mean by that? What natural resources are you referring to?

Oil

If you're thinking Tar Sands, that's Ft McMurray, which isn't terribly northern in comparison to the territories. I don't think that the oil in the territories hasn't really been capitalized upon because it's so remote.

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

#37
post #25
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better not use that $1B to buy Huawei stuff.

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…

>Why? I'm honestly bothered by this Cold War mentality...

You should direct this question to China instead.

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

#38

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…

> 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.

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

#39
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 tak…

Also, Fort McMurray isn't North - it's 10 degrees latitude south and twenty degrees C warmer than Ilaquit.

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

#40

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…

> 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.

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.

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