Telesat is the Canadian operator that somehow managed to look sleepy even in an industry full of GEO dinosaurs. For decades it was the polite middleweight: a few GEOs over the Americas, a steady video business, some enterprise contracts, and a reputation for being conservative to the point of invisibility. It never had the scale of SES, the drama of Intelsat, or the subsidies of Eutelsat. It was just there, humming quietly along.

Then came Lightspeed, the LEO constellation that was supposed to drag Telesat into the future. The pitch was solid enough: a 300-plus satellite Ka-band system focused on enterprise and government markets rather than retail broadband, sold as the anti-Starlink. The reality has been a financing nightmare.

Announced in 2016, delayed repeatedly, scaled back in 2023, and still not anywhere close to deployment. Inflation gutted the budget, supply chain delays made matters worse, and the company spent years trying to scrape together funding packages from Ottawa, Quebec, and provincial pension funds. Every year Starlink grew more dominant while Telesat’s constellation remained a press release.

The current plan is for MDA to build the satellites in Canada, with the first launches penciled in for 2026. If that schedule holds, and history says it won’t, Telesat will be entering the market a full decade behind SpaceX, with a fraction of the scale and none of the consumer momentum. The bet is that enterprise customers, airlines, governments, and the military will prefer a “trusted” Canadian provider to Musk’s chaos machine. Maybe some will, but it’s hard to see how the economics work when Starlink is already selling to everyone from airlines to DoD.

Meanwhile, the GEO fleet keeps shrinking, video revenues keep falling, and Telesat’s room to maneuver keeps narrowing. The Canadian government clearly wants the company to survive, if only as a flag carrier for national pride. That explains the subsidies, the financing guarantees, and the political pressure to keep Lightspeed alive. But national pride doesn’t change physics or balance sheets.

So Telesat today is a company with one foot in the grave and the other dangling over the LEO hype train. Lightspeed might buy it relevance if it actually flies, but the odds of it matching Starlink’s scale or cadence are near zero. At best, it becomes a niche enterprise network with just enough government customers to limp along. At worst, it becomes the next “what could have been” footnote in satcom history.