Thank you for that question.
Before I came here, I had a one-hour meeting with Leslie Klein, the CEO of C-COM Satellite Systems, which is right here in Ottawa. Mr. Klein has done research with us in the area of antenna systems for the last few years. Recently, together with the NSERC program, we got together for a very large, five-year collaborative program to take this forward together.
What is this project? Think about how the world is moving, the world of mobility. Right now, we are developing a mobile antenna. Here's what it means. The antenna you think of is a nice big dome with wires sticking out, and there you collect your information and you're able to watch TV or listen to radio. We have developed a printed circuit board that will act as an antenna. The next stage is how to make sure that it can be scaled up and implemented in homes and in cars. Our plan is to put it on top of the roof of a car, so that any car that leaves an area that has Wi-Fi or Internet broadband access in the city can go to a rural area and still have Wi-Fi and Internet access. It's a tremendous opportunity in terms of changing the landscape of mobility.
What's important here is this. C-COM designs antenna systems. They don't make antenna systems. They design them, but they're built in Canada, with 7,000 sold every year to 106 companies around the world. My question to him was, what happens next? He said that if Waterloo can pull this off, we will sell millions. I asked him how he was going to make them. He said that the only people who have come to talk to him so far are the Chinese. They have found him, and they have offered their hand to manufacture millions of these antennas.
I said to him,“Leslie, do not talk to the Chinese.” I have nothing against the Chinese, but “please don't”, I said. As for what he should do, I said, when we're ready, and we will be in two or three years, let's get the government and the other supply chains together and let's work in a room to figure out how to build the new market. It's going to be a new market in making antenna systems. We'll integrate it so they can be pulled off the shelf at Canadian Tire and stuck on the top of your car. That's what we should think about. We have to bring all the players together to make it here. The technology is here. It was developed here. Bell did that right here in Canada, and now we are licensing Wi-Fi and telecommunications. We have to make sure that we get to Mr. Klein first.