Ontario won’t meet rural broadband target, partly due to cancelling Starlink deal
The Ford government will fail to meet its target of connecting unserved or underserved communities to reliable broadband by the end of 2025, Global News has learned, at least partly because of the premier’s decision to tear up a contract for Starlink internet.
In 2021, the province launched a plan to connect every household in Ontario to high-speed broadband, promising even the most remote communities would have access by the end of this year.
Now, though, with October ending, officials are accepting the target is no longer possible, indicating contract chaos from the Canada-U.S. trade war and construction delays are bogging down the plan.
The updated goal to connect everyone in the province to broadband is moving forward three years to 2028.
One of the reasons the goal needs to be moved, a source told Global News, is the ripple effect of Premier Doug Ford’s decision to scrap a $100 million contract with Elon Musk’s satellite Starlink internet service.
The now-defunct agreement between Ontario and SpaceX was first signed in November 2024 to provide satellite internet to roughly 15,000 homes in the north of the province.
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When tariffs were unveiled by United States President Donald Trump a few months later, however, Ford said he would retaliate by “ripping up” the agreement with Musk, who was then a central figure in the Trump administration.
“It’s done,” Ford said in March. “We’re not going back there, it’s done.”
The process of ripping up the contract proved more complicated than the premier had first indicated and ultimately resulted in Ontario agreeing to pay Starlink an undisclosed break fee.
Cancelling the agreement also had consequences for the province’s attempts to connect remote homes.
The government source, speaking confidentially, said there were no “feasible” alternatives to Starlink that the province could use. They said officials are working through other options, but none are yet ready.
Essentially, the source said, no other satellite internet options can take on the slack left by cancelling the Starlink deal, with alternatives like Rogers satellite utilizing Musk’s company’s resources.
The broadband plan has also met with construction delays in remote parts of the province.
Many of the physical broadband expansion plans are in the hardest-to-reach parts of Ontario, with contractors encountering setbacks laying the fibre optic cables required to bring the rural areas online.
In a bid to boost those projects, a new regulation will take effect tomorrow, allowing internet companies to more easily piggyback on hydro poles across the province.
That, the government hopes, will save time by allowing fibre cables to be quickly installed on existing infrastructure, rather than having to blast through rockface to bury them or install separate internet poles across the north.
If, with the new measures in place, delays with construction persist, the government may re-contract the work to meet its new 2028 timeline. The source said conversations around that were still in their early stages and stressed many projects were still proceeding at a decent pace.
While Ontario will fail to hit its 2025 target, the government said it stood by the overall goal. The new deadline to offer widespread rural internet is now set for halfway through 2028, and officials insist progress is being made.
More homes, they say, will be connected at the end of this year than before, and the almost $4 billion internet expansion remains the largest in the country.
When the government first announced its plan in 2021, it said as many as 700,000 households lacked access to high-speed internet or had no broadband access at all.
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