Forget Starlink. Indigenous Innovation Is Canada’s Best Bet for Rural Internet – Macleans.ca
May 2, 2025
Musk’s satellite giant has 400,000 Canadian subscribers, but homegrown networks ensure our sovereignty
In the summer of 2023, during the wildfires near Yellowknife, I got a text from my colleague Lyle Fabian, the founder of KatloTech, a Northern Indigenous-owned IT company. He sent me a photo of his campsite, set up like a mobile office, his laptop perched on a folding table. He had created his own Wi-Fi network that allowed campers to stream content from his servers and stay connected with friends and family at the site. In the period between evacuation orders and returning home, Lyle had bridged the digital divide for wildfire evacuees.
Lyle’s work represents the kind of hybrid solution that northern, Indigenous, rural and remote communities often devise to access high-speed connectivity in Canada. But while some households and organizations connect to homegrown solutions like Lyle’s, many others have adopted Starlink, the satellite internet system operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Starlink is now Canada’s sixth-largest internet provider, with around 400,000 subscribers and about $420 million in yearly Canadian revenue. It’s primarily used in the north, as well as rural and remote areas—places that don’t yet offer fast, reliable and reasonably priced non-satellite services.
