
Huawei heats up the battle for internet in Canada's north - LyalinDotCom
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49415867
======
Scoundreller
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.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
> 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
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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rshnotsecure
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/)

~~~
kalleboo
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.

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

~~~
grecy
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.

~~~
jeromegv
You mean Ottawa? Because the province of Ontario is not contributing to the
territory of Yukon.

~~~
anewguy9000
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
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.

~~~
sdfasdfsafasf
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.)

~~~
peeters
> But all the programs you listed and the eq. program are net transfers from
> rich (and less politically powerful [1]) to poorer provinces.

Provinces don't pay tax. People do. They're net transfers from rich _people_
(regardless of where they live) to poorer provinces. It just so happens that
Alberta has a high per-capita income these days (not always the case). That's
not a bad problem to have.

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walrus01
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.

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m23khan
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
A significant portion of Canada's wealth comes from the north and afaik
settlement is required it retain claim over this territory.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
> 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
Oil

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
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.

