Thanks very much. Again, thank you for inviting SaskTel to speak to you.
What I will focus on today is essentially rural infrastructure. Your other presenters have talked about the slower communications and about online. Again, online purchasing in rural areas could be very advantageous. We have something in the order of 65% of our small businesses in Saskatchewan located outside of Regina and Saskatoon. They're spread over something in the order of 660,000 square kilometres.
We have a number of items, and I was hoping that we could describe how we have to try to serve some of those areas. We have wired Internet in every town of over a hundred people. We have full-fibre backbone. We have over 400 towers with 4G, and we're doing satellite in remote regions. That sounds like quite a bit, but it's still not enough. We have a population density that can only support one facilities provider. There really isn't a business case to go out there and do various facilities-based providers. So what we're trying to do in Saskatchewan, with our providing the facilities, is that there is competition in telecom, in other online services, or in other services—not in the infrastructure but in the services themselves that go with that communications infrastructure.
One of the things I'd like to point out today, though, is that some of the new decisions.... For example, mandated roaming ensures that there only be one service provider in most of rural Saskatchewan; there's no longer a business case for someone else to begin to build there.
I said all those small businesses are in rural areas, and they really do need connectivity if they're going to continue to do that. Satellite will reach most of the places, but satellite doesn't always meet all of their needs because of the latency. As you heard from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, we also need some other kinds of speed, and again they mentioned some of that latency as well for some of their businesses as they go forward.
Rural businesses also lack some of the ICT expertise. They have an option now with infrastructure that they use cloud-based kinds of services, services that can provide them with the kinds of base that they need to begin to do business.
I talked about all of the wired Internet and other kinds of things in small-town Saskatchewan—and it doesn't matter, it can be small-town Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or Alberta and most of B.C. Most of the medium-sized businesses do not live or reside right inside the town itself. They are on the peripheral because of taxes or environmental or they get the space to do that kind of thing. In many instances they are just outside of where we can provide this wired Internet. It's just because of the technology called DSL technology. When we put in fibre, it will be just outside of those areas.
So we have a real problem in reaching those medium-sized businesses, and it's very expensive to meet them with fibre or other kind of wireline. I have in our presentation that it costs us something in the order of $18,000 per kilometre to plough fibre. If your business is four or five kilometres outside of a town, that can get to be very expensive. So we're looking at other kinds of new wireless options.
As we go down these new wireless options, we need spectrum. As I said, everyone, every company, every service is running over our infrastructure. We need access to that kind of spectrum to provide that for those businesses. There was a recent decision by the federal government on the 700-megahertz spectrum, one of the most valuable rural spectrums just because it reaches very far: 30 kilometres away from a tower. A tower can cost us a $1 million to build, so we don't have a lot of people we can meet in that way. With the 700, we can meet that. We can provide the new technologies with LTE over what our entire footprint is and meet the needs of a lot of people.
The problem with those decisions that came with 700 megahertz is that the auction format favours national providers. It maximizes revenue for the country as a whole, regardless of the bids of the individual licences. So if a national provider provides a bid for all of Canada, that bid will supersede what might have been just a larger bid for Saskatchewan or that of some of the other small providers like Eastlink in the Atlantic and Vidéotron in southern Quebec.
After all the dust settles on the auction, much of that spectrum will go unused in rural areas for at least 10 years. People are buying that spectrum for urban areas. They can go...and now they have mandated roaming on SaskTel's towers. They don't have to build any more towers; they're using our spectrum. They're not going to use that spectrum. Right now, we have no way to go to Industry Canada and ask to either use that spectrum or share that spectrum at some sort of reasonable cost as we go forward.
For policies to stimulate some services in rural areas, we've got to recognize in our policies that rural can only support one infrastructure. We've got to support that rural infrastructure. The U.S. has recognized this, and it's developed policies to ensure that the rural-based infrastructure is healthy and expands in the new areas. With everyone using our facilities, we can't necessarily expand because we're not getting any revenue, or any substantial revenue, to go out and expand those services. Scarce spectrum resources shouldn't be allowed to lie unused. We should be able to share this unused spectrum until the owner wants it, and then we will go.
I'm sorry; I'm almost taking too much time.
Lastly is that national companies using existing rural infrastructure to reach businesses have to contribute to the real cost of building in rural areas. We can't leave it just to the rural providers as we do that.
With that, I think my time is up. I apologize if I've gone over.
Thank you very much.