Good afternoon. I'm C.J. Prudham, the executive vice-president, general counsel for Xplornet Communications Inc. With me is James Maunder, vice-president of communications and public affairs.
Thank you for the invitation. We are delighted to be here today to participate in the committee's study on rural broadband connectivity. At Xplornet, it's a subject we understand very well. Our business was founded over 10 years ago with a simple mission: to make affordable, high-speed broadband available to every Canadian. This is what drives us.
Xplornet is today the eighth-largest Internet service provider in Canada and the only one in the top 10 exclusively focused on rural Canada. We are truly national, serving over 350,000 households, or over 800,000 Canadians, every day in every province and territory. We want rural Canadians, wherever they choose to live, to be able to affordably connect to what matters.
Therefore, our goal at Xplornet is to deliver the Internet to our rural customers at the same speeds that Canadians receive it in the largest cities. As we announced in 2015, Xplornet will deliver packages with speeds of 100 Mbps by 2020 throughout our service area—double the CRTC's target.
As was noted by others before this committee, Canada's geography requires a diversity of technologies—fibre, fixed wireless, and satellite—to connect the country. All of these technologies can achieve the results.
Canada's population density averages just under four Canadians per square kilometre. Yet today, virtually all Canadians, 99%, have access to Internet connectivity, and that includes 95% of rural Canadians. Canada is ranked fourth in the G20 for per capita broadband connections that exceed 15 megabits per second.
We got here through hard work, innovation, and unprecedented private sector investment. In the last five years alone, Xplornet has invested over $1 billion in its network, focused entirely on bringing better service to rural Canada. No doubt other providers will share their figures.
Now that coverage exists virtually everywhere in Canada, the question becomes how to keep up with consumers' growing needs for speed and data. The introduction of 5G networks and the Internet of things is transforming our everyday lives. In 24 months, the average Canadian household will have between 15 and 20 devices connected to the Internet.