Analyzing the broadband divide in the underserved Southern Gulf Islands

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dc.contributor.authorArcher, Finnegan
dc.date.accessioned2025-08-07T16:18:50Z
dc.date.available2025-08-07T16:18:50Z
dc.date.issued2025
dc.description.abstractBroadband internet access has rapidly become essential for facilitating social, educational, and economic development. Yet rural communities lacking the economies of scale to justify the upfront costs of traditional cabled connections face a digital divide. To address this, line-of-sight (LOS) technologies help alleviate infrastructure deployment expenses, although they come with unique performance challenges. Starlink, SpaceX's low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite service, connects user terminals to overhead satellites and can outperform the Universal Service Objective (USO). Similarly, cellular networks such as those provided by Rogers and Telus use radio signals optimized for coverage and reliability. Our research explores the real-world performance of these solutions in the Southern Gulf Islands using a vehicular setup equipped with a Starlink Mini dish, an external GPS module, a dashboard camera, and cellular modems carrying Telus and Rogers SIMs. Metrics including latency, iperf3 throughput, GPS location, and cellular SNR were gathered alongside footage to assess performance. Quantitative data analysis demonstrated that regional terrain features, such as dense tree coverage, heavily affect line-of-sight performance.
dc.description.reviewstatusReviewed
dc.description.scholarlevelUndergraduate
dc.description.sponsorshipValerie Kuehne Undergraduate Research Awards (VKURA)
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/22560
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherUniversity of Victoria
dc.subjectdigital divide
dc.subjectLine-of-Sight networks
dc.subjectnetwork performance testing
dc.subjectbroadband connectivity
dc.subjectLow-Earth-Orbit satellites
dc.subjectcellular networks
dc.subject.departmentDepartment of Mathematics and Statistics
dc.subject.departmentDepartment of Computer Science
dc.titleAnalyzing the broadband divide in the underserved Southern Gulf Islands
dc.typePoster

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