Mr. Chair, members of the committee, Mr. Clerk, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on this very important issue.
I am Allison Lenehan, president of Xplornet Communications. We are Canada's leading provider of rural broadband. We only serve rural Canada.
Xplornet has raised and invested over $800 million of private capital. We have done what other telecom companies and government thought impossible. We have made high-speed Internet available to 100% of Canadians. That's right, 100%. There's nowhere in Canada we cannot reach with high-speed Internet.
First, I have a note on what rural means. Rural is not a place; it is a density. On page 4 of our handout we are showing you just outside the city limits of Waterloo, Ontario. It looks the same outside every city and town in Canada. We need to use the best technology to fit the density. If there are fewer than 30 households per square kilometre at any given place, then using wires to deliver broadband to homes and businesses is uneconomical. There you use fixed wireless or satellite. We simply cannot wire the second largest country in the world, nor do we need to.
We use two technologies to serve rural Canadians, both wirelessly based to enable ubiquitous coverage. For more than 92% of Canadians, it means 4G service. We were the first telecom in Canada to launch a national 4G network specifically for rural broadband, using hundreds of 4G wireless towers and two new high throughput satellites to deliver 4G service from coast to coast.
All this technology means that rural Canadians in the 4G footprint will, starting next week, have access to speeds of 10 megabits per second at prices similar to what urban Canadians pay. That is twice the CRTC goal of 5 megabits per second and ahead of schedule.
The remaining 8% of Canadians will have access to speeds of 3 megabits per second. That means every home in Canada will have access to at least 3 megabits.
On page 6 you will find the details of our service packages. That is not mobile broadband like the one used to do light Googling on your smart phone. This is real broadband for the home, just like urban customers use at their home or office.
That's the good news, but there are challenges: one, capacity to meet future needs, and two, adoption of broadband. We can address adoption once we have solved the first problem of sufficient access capacity. The capacity situation is more ominous. There is the potential for one of our game-changing technologies to be literally choked off by policy.
Slides 8 through 14 tell the story. To deliver wireless Internet, we need radio spectrum. As consumer demand continues to grow, the need for spectrum grows. Spectrum is optioned and licensed by Industry Canada, but the nature of the rules around the auction and licensing processes are such that rural ISPs—Xplornet and hundreds of others—cannot buy spectrum because spectrum is auctioned in blocks that include major cities.
For example, to buy Durham, Ontario, we have to buy all of the greater Toronto area. That is not feasible. The end result is that rural ISPs cannot get spectrum and the big telcos end up with vast amounts of rural spectrum far beyond what they could ever use for mobile cellular services that go unused.
Slides 10 and 11 show excess rural spectrum that is a vital resource, which can be used, as opposed to completely wasted, when desperately needed rural Internet services can be provided.
Industry Canada has made no plans to make spectrum for rural Canadian Internet, when it would be easy to do so. It could be done either by designating some spectrum to be for rural Canada or by simply taking back spectrum that has been hoarded and unused by Canadian companies and assigning it for rural broadband use.
Please don't just take our word for it. Attached at the back of your packages is the support of a couple of our municipalities.
Finally, we are pleased to have worked so hard to get rural Canadians access to real affordable broadband in their homes. In the next three to five years, we could deliver 100 megabits per second to all Canadians, but only if we have access to affordable spectrum. The private sector has the money and technology. We need your help with the public spectrum.
Thank you.