The CRTC is embarking on a multi year study/consultation of what to do with our lagging broadband deployment. Just yesterday, the government bragged about a multi milliuon subsidy to give a community 3mbps service. Can't help but to participate ... So I would like some feedback/sanity checks on a few issues. There is of course a large disconnect between marketed speeds and actual capacity and delivered speeds. 1- Satellite internet I am aware of latest generation satellites that provide focused antennas allowing re-use of the same spectrum for different regions. What sort of bandwidth is realistic for service to customers ? Australia's original NBN has 12mbps service planned for those in remote regions via satellite. Is this realistic ? Or is 3mbps really the max that can reliably be expected ? In terms of latency, would the special routers that "proxy" the TCP acks at both ends of the satellite link be commonplace now ? Still custom jobs ? or do modern TCP stacks now deal effectively with very high latency such that streaming data via satellite no longer requires special equipment to use bandwidth effectively ? For other protocols such as UDP etc, is latency an issue to be concerned with ? 2- Underwater fibre. There has been a project to string fibre from Tokyo to London via the canadian arctic. http://arcticfibre.com/ One aspect of this project are landings are various island that have canadian communities (which rely exclusively on satellite for telephone/data). While dumping fibre underwater is common, landing it in arctic areas is less common (think ice pack movement scraping bottom of shores). The folks on web site say they had done research on this. Are there examples where this was done succcesfully ? Or is this still something that is new and untested ? 3- Permafrost Ok, not an issue in USA, but wondering if there is knowledge of string long fibre cables on land that is permafrost (think Dawson City to Inuvik, roughly 700km). Has Russia or other nordic countries done this ? or are microwave link at regular intervals still the only/best way with vew structures built on the unstable ground ? I'd appreciate any insight/opinions on what is realistic and what is pipe dream.