Okay, here we go. Thank you very much for asking the spectrum question. It's the elephant in the room. It's the private versus public, and we are all familiar with the spectrum squatting that has gone on for over 15 years now.
The first thing I'd say is that if you don't use it, you lose it—except in Canada, where you don't have to use it. You you can just keep it, and keep it out of the hands of entities, small entities like mine or Mr. Finlayson's.
There are a couple of problems. The first is that spectrum is priced on twisted pair copper per 56 kilobits, and so if I get a private licensed radio, Industry Canada looks at how many twisted pair 56 kilobits of spectrum I can put into that and prices it accordingly. It doesn't even matter if it's in the remote location and I'm doing a point-to-point for a client; this is just an archaic way of pricing spectrum in the first place. I'm sure many people have said that.
The second, of course, is that when you do an auction, you're auctioning off an asset that the public has. It is no different from a barrel of oil. When we sell land or a barrel of oil, we want a royalty in return, and we want it to be utilized. If you don't use that purchased land within five years, it expires and it goes back to the auction where other people can buy it. There's nothing wrong with the spectrum auction. What the telecom companies recognized a long time ago was that with the bandwidth and how much spectrum was going to be required, they were going to need to acquire and hold on to as much spectrum as possible. It wasn't about the immediate need; it was about the future need. We can go into Inukshuk about that. I refer to the other 98 people who have met before you.
So again it comes back to what I think is allocating proper spectrum in a defined area for companies that have an opportunity to make their capital costs back, provide the service, build the infrastructure, and then open it back up to free market.