Industry Committee on March 26th, 2013

[Allison Lenehan]

Those are great points. First of all, when I speak of “rural”, the key point is economic development. Look at all the natural resources that reside in rural. It's such a critical component. So I agree with you that our digital strategy and our economic development are very aligned, at least with respect to rural broadband.

Secondly—and I want to make sure I'm very clear about this—we're pro the development of our mobile networks. Just keep in mind that when in rural—and that's what part of this presentation does—a lot of the mobile traffic is offloaded to fixed. In urban, that's fixed to a wire line. In rural, it's fixed to another wireless-related tower or satellite, which again shares the same form of spectrum, so you're sharing the same resource in rural that is different from urban, because most of your traffic is offloaded to wired.

I agree with you that economic development and our digital strategy are very aligned, and I look forward to the inclusion of rural broadband as part of that, because it taps into all of the development that's going on nationwide.

You can pick every province and territory, and we have such a growing development in every province and territory that is better developed if you are connected with more robust broadband. It's not just the people who are in those areas who need access to it, but the businesses that are taking advantage of all those natural resources are in fact requiring more and more robust broadband.

I'm not sure if that answers your question.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

That's helpful.

Just on this area, you said that in order for the data to be moved, you're fixed to another wireless contact. When you're doing it twice like that, does that take up more spectrum?

[Allison Lenehan]

Yes, that's precisely on slide 13.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

So in order for rural areas to do the same thing, we actually need more spectrum to do it. Is that what you're saying?

[Allison Lenehan]

Relatively speaking, there's no question, because while mobile broadband is growing in percentages a great deal, relatively speaking, it's still 2 gigabytes, and fixed is 20 gigabytes per home. On fixed, you're going to see that go to 60 to 70 gigabytes. So it's just the sheer amount of volume, which is also part of the offloading of mobile traffic. Even though you don't see it, each of those devices that you are using for mobile are in fact tapping into the fixed infrastructure to handle all that volume. In rural, it's sharing the same resource, which is spectrum. You're bang on when it comes to rural. We're sharing the same resource spectrum, whereas for urban that's not the case. You're offloading a lot of that to wire line.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

One of the other comments, by Mr. Scott Smith, in the previous meeting is:

...roughly $4.2 trillion worth of business is available on the Internet economy right now, and Canada is not capturing what I would say is its fair share. Because of this lack of useful connectivity, it's passing us by.

Can anyone answer why that's happening?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Mr. Easter, that would be nice, but I do have some clear guidelines.

Witnesses, I want to thank you very much for your participation. There were great answers to some very good questions.

Now we have to go off to vote.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Have you offered them to submit—

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Yes, to that question or anything else, if you'd like to put some closing remarks in writing to the committee chair, please go ahead and do that.

The meeting is adjourned.