Okay.
The answer to how we stack up against the world isn't an easy one. I'm not aware of a good source of data to measure that. Akamai, which is the contribution distribution network, broadly speaking, produces the report each quarter on the state of the Internet. They used to look at cities, so they measured broadband speed in cities, and the last time they did that was 2011. They've stopped doing it because it's just too complicated, I think.
But at that time, of the top 100 cities with broadband speeds around the world, there were two Canadian cities on that list: Victoria was in 81st position, with average speeds of 7.5 megabits per second, and Oakville was in 97th. That's really the only hard data point we have from 2011.
More recently, their 2012 third-quarter data shows that 70% of Canadian connections are above 4 megabits per second, but we're not in the top 10 internationally for average or peak connection speeds. Much of this data is consumer data, but it's still measuring the ability to connect into businesses, and so on. It seems that we don't have really good data, but the data we have suggests that Canadian cities are not world leading in terms of speeds of broadband. If you look at some places that are, they're places like Chattanooga, in Tennessee, where the municipal utility has built out a gigabit-per-second broadband network there. What that has done is it's become a huge hub for regional development. Companies from across the U.S. are moving into Chattanooga because there's this broadband connectivity there.
The question becomes, how could we do something similar here? What would be needed? Clearly, there are opportunities to build particular spaces, so build industry, industrial parks, build networks, build regions...providing this high-speed symmetrical fibre connectivity, and drawing business into that.
To the extent that municipalities can help with planning, it's not so clear exactly how the federal government drives that at the municipal level, but, clearly, any initiative that it can do to help foster that would be good.