Huawei heats up the battle for internet in Canada's north | Hacker News Reader

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

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52 pointsLyalinDotCom37 comments

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.

Equipment and phone makers need new "Gs" to sell more products, 5G overall is pointless. 5G may never be commercially viable in Canada.

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.

> 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.

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/

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

You should direct this question to China instead.

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

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

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.

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.

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.)

> 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Because the High Arctic relocation was so beneficial... (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_relocation if you're not familiar with this event in Canada's history).

> 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.

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 caught) is likely to rise. Minerals are already extracted all around the northern territories, an increase in temperature is likely to make some regions/zones economically viable, just take a look at Europe and China's race towards Greenland's potential rare-metal stock [5]. As a trade route, it can be considered one of the safest and fastest route to connect the East of North America and Europe to Asian markets. Just to give you a sense of how much money circulates in Trade Routes, the Suez Canal in Egypt hit a record revenue of $5.5billion in 17-18 [6]. Even if the northern region only becomes viable for half of the year, it may still be worthwhile, just look at other industries (think Tourism) that are on the same boat.

Countries have gone to war for territory and resources for millennia, if Canada doesn't position itself well to protect it, someone else may come and try to take it away from you. This can happen via fisherman/oilers invading your territory, among many other ways. Always remember, if you are not willing to take the risks and investment is potentials, someone else is and when they strike gold, you may only be able to watch it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_resources_race [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-arctic-insight-idU... [3] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [4] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/fish-stocks-are-used-... [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/science/earth/arctic-reso... [6] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-economy-suezcanal/eg...

As a counterpoint, we can agree that the sea has lots of resources as well and that does not mean that we are all going to live in an oil platform because that is simply not ideal. There are well paying jobs to be had in those regions, but I do believe the parent post has a point on limiting stuff. Is it economically viable to build a underwater community? towns in the middle of the mosquito infested Amazon? etc etc

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.

I am sorry but, as a Canadian they way I understood it was that those people in our far north have sacrificed a lot of the every day freedoms and luxuries that we have in order for Canada to maintain territorial claim over the land. Our government literally scooped up people and their families and relocated them there and left them there to starve at first. If those communities were not there Canada would have lost claim to it. So we tax payers as you put it have agreed to have a higher welfare system up there for those people and to ship them milk and other supplies even though it cost ridiculous amounts of money. Because one day all that ice will free up and the amount of resources up there will be incredible.

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