I'd say that inasmuch as there are examples of regulation gone right, there are also examples of regulation gone wrong. There's the example of the deferral account, where there is activity in rural Canada to deploy and we're deploying with the benefit of Telesat's Ka-band satellite service. We're deploying wireless broadband service. There is a new model in the province of Alberta, something called SuperNet, where the government working with Bell has built a province-wide Internet backbone.
All of those initiatives are new. Disruptive technology is on its way, and those are great examples. The question is, can regulation keep up?
We have the example in our view of the world that deferral account is regulation gone wrong. We're competing. We've invested $50 million in private equity, private capital, over a period of about 18 months. Today--2006 would have been our first full year of operation with both satellite and wireless--we have 35,000 rural broadband customers.
So I think those are indicators that innovation is working. The challenge for us, though, is a situation of regulation gone wrong, and with the deferral account, an example where the regulator was trying to create, incent, or assist urban, local telephone competition, $621 million is captured in the deferral account and a decision is made to push that into the rurals to help with broadband. Again, you have a very distortionary decision that has a very negative impact on our business model.
So yes, innovation is happening. Disruptive technology is here and it's not necessarily being contained in Canada. The forces are global. They're not just Canadian, and we have to be prepared to adapt. The question is on whether regulation is adapting. We have a very specific example in the deferral account where we don't think it is keeping up. It's not reflecting the advances in business models nor in technology.