Greenland’s National Telco, Tusass, Signs New Agreement with Eutelsat

Somewhat related to that, but Israel is launching satellites in the opposite direction than the rest of the world when they launch from their shores, this is so the launch is done over the Mediterranean sea and not their neighbors.

There's already a broad range of inclinations spanning from equatorial to polar (and slightly beyond polar (slightly "backwards"), for sun-synchronous orbits)—they already have enormous relative velocities, at up to 90-degree relative angles. Satellites going completely "backwards" wouldn't meaningfully make things worse.

Seems like they partnered with SpaceX.

https://www.ipinternational.net/oneweb-and-spacex-a-surprisi...

From a quick skim of their Wikipedia page[0]: basically anything they could get their hands on. Arianes 1 through 5, Atlas II and III, Delta IV, Proton, Zenit, Long March 3, Falcon 9.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutelsat

ISRO have done a couple of launches.

And terminal costs will be through the roof in comparison.

Who else out there is making full-on beamforming capable satellite terminals under $1k? Kymeta's over $20k+ for a single dish.

People may hate the company and the man behind it but there's something special about being able to grab specialized satcoms hardware for like $300 at Best Buy.

10 years ago a BGAN terminal ran me $5000+ and a 384k connection several thousand bucks a month. Now you can get ~512k for $5 a month in Standby Mode on a $300 dish.

How do you know Greenland are paying consumer prices?

no fucking way you pay 600+ usd for 40gb data

> Greenland decision was political not technical to pay x5 more for x10 slower service.

I dunno, is "bus factor" a political or technical thing to consider? How about "did the country of this business threaten us before?" a technical or political consideration?

Personally, I'd try to stay away from entities I can't rely on, on a technical basis. Based on the article, it seems like Greenland traded stability and resilience for performance and price, doesn't seem political.

lol two clicks just to be able to do what you original were doing is terrible.

I clicked once and couldn't see the button to reject everything...

Might be because i'm on a 14" laptop and it didn't fit on screen.

Click on "settings", and be surprised what "accept all" means.

Note: each of the tabs on the left has their own "vendors" you may grant access. In total, there are over 800 toggle switches.

No, I want to reject the cookies not disable the dialog.

Consent-O-Matic does it for most sites but not on this particular type of dialog.

It's not bias. It's clickbait.

Reality seems to be closer to: "After talks with Starlink and Eutelsat, Greenland went with Eutelsat because of trust and long-term cooperation". But with such title people wouldn't need to click the link to read the full article.

But you can only read it that way after reading the whole article. It’s a known fact that a very high percentage of people read the title without clicking on it, therefpre this is pure misinformation spreading and should be removed.

The comments were most interesting for me, because I learned Eutelsat has over 600 satellites. As you mention, the media has framed Starlink as the only company providing good coverage. I never looked in more detail (I have fiber at home and great 5G coverage across the country I live in), so it was nice to learn that there is some competition. (Especially since the US has weaponized US services as of recently, like cutting off the e-mail services of the chief prosecutor of the ICC.)

> I think its newsworthy

Nobody is arguing that it isn't newsworthy.

> if this becomes a trend Starlink may become unviable business for a market of just 300M people.

345M people. Of which, the real market is around 15M households. Everyone else already has wired broadband. I suppose some people will want an additional link for redundancy, but my understanding is that Starlink satellites would be oversubscribed if urban areas had significant adoption.

> the media cycle ... since years framed Starlink as the only company providing such services and it turns out that you can actually use some other services.

AFAIK, you, as end user, cannot. Last time i checked that Eutelsat offers the service only as wholesale, to ISPs and other large customers, not to regular end-users.

Starlink works, rockets are landing safely, electric cars are definitely set to be the norm and there's a guy or two out there who legit are moving a computer cursor with their thoughts.

I reckon he has delivered on plenty.

This is pretty much exactly correct. This comment should be pinned to the top of this whole thread, because it does nobody any good when "alternative facts" are valued more highly than a boring truth.

The "uses others solutions" bit is for satellite alone when it comes to Tusass. They own and run all other types of telecom service in Greenland whether fiber, cellular, microwave, or marine radio.

> (...) while Starlink (...) were simply not answering to the criterias requested.

If you read the article, that's not exactly the arguments pointed out by neither Tusass nor Greenland's politicians.

Cited from the article:

> Binzer said it was not about which company was better, but about trust and long-term cooperation. Tusass already works with Eutelsat and knows their systems well.

> Some Greenlandic politicians have warned that the country must keep control of its telecom infrastructure.

> They fear that opening the market to foreign providers could threaten national security. For now, Tusass remains the sole provider of telecommunications in Greenland.

The citations from the article are clear on how national security concerns were a key argument to not go with Starlink.

Either way, trunks will use a network that is not under sovereign control. So sovereignty here means access must exclusively be through the locally controlled monopoly. Foreign powers will still have the ability to shut down or manipulate traffic, which is hardly sovereignty at all.

> Ukraine obviously wouldn't contract anything essential from Russia

West-Ukraine wouldn't. East-Ukraine ... not so sure.

Totally. It's the same as how people feel about Canada taking over the US. The current admin is such an abomination it would be best that Canada takes control. They are very nice people. Nicest ones some would say. Imagine how nice it would be to have some stability again. All the Americans I've spoken to agree on it.

No, Greenlanders are working towards independence and gaining independence from the US seems much less likely than from Denmark. Additionally Greenlanders aren't looking with admiration at how the US has treated other indigenous peoples.

Whatever gave you that idea? Those who are opposed to Greenland being part of Denmark tend to be pro-independence, and opposition to the US taking over is even greater. Many accept the status-quo because Greenland's economy depends greatly on money flowing in from the government.

USA has and has had military bases on Greenland, once established despite opposition from native Greenlanders. Several of these are ecological disasters. There are valleys full of rusting oil drums and machinery. There are fears of there being radioactive waste hidden under the ice, expected to leak sooner or later.

That Denmark had approved some of these bases has fuelled sentiment against Denmark and the US in the first place.

They hate it. Only Greenlanders positive about it are criminals and clowns, that are literally being payed to do so.

They're not. https://www.reuters.com/world/poll-shows-85-greenlanders-do-...

What lead you to believe that? Like, ol' minihands did claim that, but he claims a lot of things.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/28/85-of-greenlan...

> But a new survey by pollster Verian, commissioned by the Danish paper Berlingske, showed only 6% of Greenlanders are in favour of becoming part of the US, with 9% undecided.

6%, for practical purposes, means 0%; whenever you have a poll with a clearly insane option, about 4-5% of people will choose it, due to a combination of mistakes and trolling.

About half of Greenlanders support independence (in a concrete sense; far more than that in an abstract sense), but that's rather different to becoming part of the US.

I'm also not a native English speaker, but ditched seems to mean:

> to get rid of something or someone that is no longer wanted:

They were considering two contracts, with two different companies, and were in talks with both of them. If they stop considering one of those contracts/companies, wouldn't it be accurate to say they "ditched" that bid/contract then?

I guess the misleading part could be that "ditched" might implicitly imply they were already using Starlink, but the "ditched" used in the title is actually about the contract, not established service?

? Yes? That's exactly what's happening, google's and meta's algos dictate which sites get traffic which is why every website is slowly but surely turning into clickbait/reels.

Well, it's a bit off-topic, but yes, Google is demonstrably killing the fabric of the Internet. Ever since they introduced the info box & knowledge graph, pretty much every change they've introduced is geared towards one goal: they don't want to just be a guide, they want to be the journey AND the destination. All the latest AI efforts are the apotheosis, the extreme logical conclusion of that. Surely I don't need to explain how this makes them extremely similar to a parasite killing its host, how this degrades the very ecosystem their foundations are built on?

That aspect I don’t find all that concerning. I just wish they had a page where they explain what AI preparation entails.

I would put the emphasis on a different word:

> This article is made and published by Anna Hartz, which may have used AI in the preparation

Which, not who. They're not even sure the author is human!

I don't understand the snark.

Considering that "using AI" can mean anything from "AI wrote the whole article" to "the author used AI to check the grammar", I'd argue this disclaimer is unnecessary and it's safe to assume AI is involved in some way nowadays.

(the author of this comment may have used AI)

TBH I'm not even sure if I'm using AI half the time. I'm pretty sure any sort of autocomplete gets marketed as AI these days, so anything I type with my phone probably counts as having used AI. "AI" is a marketing term with no fixed technical meaning.

By using the word "which" instead of "who", the editors don't even know for sure if the author _is_ AI or not.

> may

They don't even specifically know for each article if their authors use LLMs or not. What a shitshow.

The US diverts trunks for interception and active attacks all the time. Jamming the internet to Greenland during an invasion would be trivial on multiple levels. This will make virtually no difference to national security. Good for the monopoly provider though.

France is also a US ally. I would rather suspect the answer is that the French company is more willing to bend over to censorship and surveillance orders from the Greenland government.

It's not a natural monopoly, it's a legally enforced monopoly.

There was an illusion you could trust certain countries, political institutions and, for some bizarre reason, certain billionaires-cum-oligarchs.

Recent upheavals and actions have really pushed people to question exactly who and what you can trust.

Also the recent focus on strategic elements with regard to globalisation also plays into these choices now - where it might have been dismissed a couple of years ago.

That established trust has always been the Goliath that SpaceX challenged. Boeing was the only trusted company for the Commercial Crew contract, ULA was the only trusted company for payload delivery, etc.

There was a time where the world just trusted the US blindly. This is sadly not the case anymore.

There's a lot of ground between

Ally (which Greenland and the US were in 2024)

and

Active invasion

Starlink removing service is nowhere near as extreme as America jamming starlink (which would be a breach of international treaties)

You guys love the drama don't you, didn't they break up recently?