People |

By Paul Park

| September 2, 2025

OTTAWA—Some might think Dan Goldberg has his head in the clouds, but it’s actually thousands of kilometres above them.

As CEO of Telesat Corp., he runs a network of satellites to connect all parts of Canada. That footprint is only going to get bigger when the company launches its Lightspeed service. Satellites are to go up next year, with service being lit in 2027. That is delayed from the original launch date but Goldberg is unfazed.

“It’s coming along very well, I’m happy to say. It took us a while to get Lightspeed moving forward,” he reports. “It requires a very significant capital investment.” 

In a wide-ranging interview with The Wire Report at his downtown Ottawa office, the CEO outlined his vision for the company. He has been at the helm of Telesat for 19 years.

The idea of a low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite service was first broached eight years ago, he states, and had many hurdles to overcome. Besides the high cost of launching Lightspeed, which Goldberg estimates is between $5 billion to $6 billion, the COVID pandemic and supply chain issues also delayed the planning.

He says that Lightspeed is about a year to two years behind schedule.

“It’s been a mixed blessing. We would have been coming to market probably two years earlier if we had not lost some momentum because of COVID and whatnot,” Goldberg states. “On the other hand, when we were forced to regroup and figure out how to move this project forward, notwithstanding inflation, backed up supply chains, [we] kind of went back to the drawing board.”

Part of that regrouping saw a greater role for MDA Space Ltd. (formerly MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates). It was going to be a minor contractor, with the major portion of the work going to a French engineering firm. But the delays made the other company’s offer more expensive. MDA won the contract instead. 

Goldberg believes the change saved the project $3 billion. Two billion of that is in lower capital expenditures (capex), the other billion is in financing charges.

Telesat came into being in 1969. The federal government was looking at a way to connect the nation through telephony and mass communications. It established the firm as a Crown corporation. Eventually ownership was turned over to a consortium of telecommunications companies. Later on, Telesat became a wholly owned subsidiary of BCE Inc.

In 2006, Bell chair Michael Sabia decided to sell non-core assets. He hired Goldberg that year to spin Telesat off as a separate entity. The deal closed a year later.

Goldberg came to the company through a long and winding road. Originally from Arlington, Virginia,  he practised telecom regulatory law at his father’s law firm in Washington, D.C. After working for American firms, he found himself in The Hague, Netherlands working for a telecom company there. When that firm was sold to a rival, he decided to move his family back to Washington. But a headhunter scouted him for the Telesat job. He decided to take the Canadian offer and settled in his third capital city when he landed in Ottawa.

Lightspeed is not the only player in the market. Space Exploration Technologies Ltd. (SpaceX) is already serving the wholesale and retail sectors with its Starlink service. Amazon Inc. has been launching its Project Kuiper satellites with service scheduled for later this year. Goldberg isn’t worried about competing with them.

He expects Telesat to be up to the challenge, even though it will restrict itself to the enterprise and government service markets. By setting a start date of 2027, he hopes to have all Canadians online before the federal government’s deadline of 2030 to connect every resident to high-speed internet. Satellite is an important component of rolling out such service, he says.

“I think that we will play a very important role in connecting exactly the kind of communities and remote users that the government has in mind,” he explains.

“Canada is a huge country and building a terrestrial communications high-throughput network across a country as large as Canada is not viable from an economic standpoint. It’s not even viable from a practical standpoint.”

He believes that connecting all Canadians using fibre will not work in remote and northern regions, and that is why Lightspeed and its competitors are needed.

Telesat’s consolidated revenues in the second quarter of this year were $106 million, a decrease of 30 per cent from $152 million last year. Goldberg explained at the time that the decline was largely due to reduced returns from several contracts, as well as increased competition.

The CEO plans to see many more projects through at his company.

“I find the work that we’re doing here exciting,” he notes. “I plan to stick around for a while.”

ppark@thewirereport.ca