Toggle light / dark theme

This week on September 16, the Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities (FONOM) Board of Directors held a meeting to discuss their support for bringing SpaceX’s Starlink broadband internet service to Canada. “The Board adopted a resolution during a recent meeting in Hearst, held both electronically and in-person, supporting Starlink, a satellite internet service that’s being developed by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation’s (SpaceX),” FONOM representatives wrote in a press release. “The Resolution also calls on the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to permit and expand the company a Basic International Telecommunications Services (BITS) license.”

“We know today our citizens require greater connectivity than 50/10 megabits per second,” the President of FONOM Danny Whalen said in a statement. “FONOM believes that the Starlink program is our best option.”

SpaceX says its service is capable of providing low-latency broadband internet below 30 milliseconds, and download speeds greater than 100 megabits per second.


Imagine a road that always stays ice-free, interacts with vehicles to make their own electricity and has road markings that change according to live traffic. It sounds futuristic but a new partnership between The University of Manchester and Highways England is setting the wheels in motion to make this dream a reality.

Highways England is responsible for the motorways and major A roads in the country, carrying four million journeys a day. All this traffic can take its toll. Adding graphene into road maintenance has the potential to extend a road’s life, increase network performance to an industry-changing level and improve the road-user experience.

Manchester’s Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) is plotting a route to a solution, collaborating with Highways England and Pavement Testing Services to tackle low-carbon and digital road networks, and deterioration of road surfaces in the UK, with the help of graphene.