Thank you. There should be a presentation in front of everyone, in both official languages. I'll call out the panels at the top left, if I could, just to lead you through it.
First, who are we? We are the leading provider of broadband to rural Canada. We're a national provider. We have customers in every market in this country. The CRTC annual monitoring report, which basically takes a tally of all of the key statistics in the telecom industry, indicates that 83% to 85% of Canadians will receive broadband high-speed Internet through wired technology—DSL, cable, and fibre. The balance will receive broadband service through wireless or satellite technology. In essence, that is the market we focus on. That's the market we serve.
On panel 3, just to give you a little bit more background on our company, our goal and mission is to bridge and end the digital divide. Our expected time frame to do that is 2012. We use 4G—fourth generation—wireless and satellite broadband technology. In fact, I'm just two weeks from having returned from Moscow and Kazakhstan, where we launched our first high throughput, fourth generation satellite.
The company has roughly $400 million in private capital, in addition to the $400 million that we have secured to support the leases on the new satellite. One of the key messages I'll leave you with is that this is a business that has been predominantly driven by private capital.
On panel 4, the question we often get is, will Canadians living in rural communities need broadband, if given the opportunity? How important is it to them? The message I will leave you with today is that broadband high-speed Internet service is an absolute fundamental to what we are talking about here today. It's a building block for e-commerce. What clearly matters to rural Canadians is 100% reach and 100% availability. I would also offer that urban Canadians should be as concerned about the ability of rural Canadians to get access to broadband. Let's remember that a significant portion of this country's GDP actually originates in rural and remote regions of the country.
As panel 5 indicates, we do have many studies and examples, but I pulled one that is relevant to anyone living in the rural regions surrounding the city of Ottawa. We built out the rural regions around the city in 2008. A study was conducted by Leonore Evans of Carleton University. The statistics you see on page 5, frankly, are quite conservative. They indicate that 75% of business respondents said access to high-speed Internet had improved sales and profitability, 15% of all respondents in the business sector said they would be forced to relocate if they didn't have access to quality high-speed Internet, and 20% of non-business owning respondents indicated they would not be able to continue working for their current employer if they didn't have the capacity to telecommute. That is just one example. We have many examples across this country where we are being invited to participate in digital partnerships very similar to what happened here in Ottawa, with similar results.
On panel 6, there is a lot of discussion or noise out there about spectrum auctions, more so in the context of urban cellular competition. The message I want to bring to you today is that it's an absolutely critical discussion to getting wireless broadband service into rural communities. We have everything we need as an industry or sector to get to 100% broadband reach. We have fourth generation wireless in satellite technologies. We've been able to demonstrate a track record of raising private capital. We have a business model that fits the needs of rural communities. Again, the key outstanding item to address and bridge the digital divide is spectrum.
On panel 7, I will give you an example of this. This is the Toronto licence. Spectrum radio frequencies are divided into licences. This is just one example. It's a tier 4 licence. In essence, the challenge we face is rural providers. The area that is in blue is the rural, low-density areas that surround the city of Toronto. Green and yellow represents urban and suburban development. In today's world, with the rules that exist for spectrum options, Xplornet would have to purchase 94% of the total population here to get a 6% share, representing the market that we choose to serve, the rural areas.
One of the challenges today is that rural and urban areas are combined in the way that licenses are defined. What that ultimately means is that it's almost virtually impossible for us to acquire licensed spectrum, which is an absolute necessity for delivering wireless broadband.
Turning to panel 8, one of the key messages or learnings we've had over the last six years in this industry is that rural Canadians, when given the chance to access high-speed Internet, use that capability in the same manner and to the same extent as urban Canadians. Today our customers in rural regions of this country use 18 gigabytes of monthly downloading. That's the measure, the statistic of activity, and it's very similar to what urban Canadians use with DSL, cable, and other technologies. To be clear, we're not in the mobile business; we're in the fixed business. So customers are using roughly the same amount of data that they use in the urban environment.
Going to panel 9, the ask that we've made of Industry Canada, of this government, is to create rules that would allow private operators to access spectrum for rural high-speed Internet service. We have two simple requests. One is to separate or partition licences into urban and rural, and the second is to introduce competitive measures that would ensure that the largest players in the industry can't scoop or capture all of the spectrum.
In closing, we see two paths for the rural regions of this country. We believe there are some simple and practical fixes to the issue of spectrum for rural providers. With those changes made, we will have the key elements that we need to deliver the CRTC's target of 5-megabit service before 2015. In fact, we believe we can deliver that by 2013, and then we'll be in a position, confidently, to turn our attention to awareness, adoption, and advantage. That means how we gain advantage from high-speed Internet, the ability to focus our efforts on digital literacy, and fundamentals such as the availability of PCs in every home and ICT adoption in small- to medium-size business.
Frankly, these are issues that are not just rural but urban as well.
If we choose to ignore rural broadband in the upcoming spectrum auction, our concern is that we'll continue to do more of what we've done over the last five years and the issue of how to close the digital divide will remain. We'll be discussing spectrum and still be in the same place three to five years from now.