Summary: | International audience Nunavut is Canada's largest and northernmost territory. It is also the only one relying entirely on geostationary satellites for its telecommunications. Prior to the deregulation of telecommunications in Canada in 1992, the entire infrastructure in Nunavut was owned and controlled either by the state or by the trio of Telesat (satellite operator), BCE (formerly Bell Canada) and its subsidiary NorthwesTel, all supported by state subsidies. In the Canadian Arctic, these private actors own the infrastructure and catalyze federal funding, which allows them to decide on routing policies for most of the networks, following a competitive logic that reinforces Canadian dependence on American infrastructure. The Nunavut case study allows us to analyze how satellite constellations such as Starlink on the Canadian market disrupt both the interconnection logic of the actors traditionally responsible for data routing and the power relations between the latter and the various governance bodies in the Canadian Arctic territories.
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