Thank you for having us. Thanks for your time today, committee.
We at SWIFT in southwestern Ontario believe that broadband really should be an essential utility. We cannot participate in the modern economy today without it. We believe that SWIFT is the solution that is in place for southwestern Ontario today.
I'm not going to read this whole slide, but currently we have a lot of underserved areas. The density may be slightly higher than it is in Saskatchewan, but not by much in many of the rural areas in southwestern Ontario. Our residents have unequal access to digital services. Our urban residents have much better access than our rural residents, again, meaning access to education, health care, government services, the whole thing.
Even cows wear Fitbits now. Our agricultural communities are very dependent on technology. The third line in the fourth concession needs as much or, arguably, more broadband than their urban counterpart, because they have to drive farther to get to access services when they don't have broadband.
There are urban needs as well. We have a member of SWIFT who's building a data centre in Cambridge. There's not enough fibre for the customer to build the data centre in our technology triangle in southwestern Ontario.
It's a big problem. How does SWIFT solve this? Our catchment area, our project area, has 10% of Canada's population. We have an aggregated demand model. We have members who join our organization, and we do procurements on their behalf. When we go to the providers—we now have 1,500 sites today, and we hope to have 3,000 by May or June—that then gets on the table so that when providers bid for services, it's not only the current incumbents who are bidding for service but also, potentially, new providers coming into the area. That increases the competition, which is what we're hoping will solve the problem in the long term in these rural areas. If we get more competition, the market will take care of itself.
We have data-driven decisions. We'll get to that in a second with regard to the relationship with the University of Guelph.
Just as a quick snapshot of where we are, for the folks who aren't from Ontario, in southwestern Ontario we have 14 first nations in our catchment area and about 25% of Ontario's population.
I touched on our aggregated demand model. We're a membership-based organization. We have members from the public sector, the private sector, agriculture, all of those organizations that need connectivity. We're going to use that aggregated demand to have more say with the providers when we go to public procurement. We have one on the street right now.
The municipalities that started this project have $17 million to date, and we have a target of $18 million to $20 million for the project. The municipalities are very serious about helping their residents and want to partner with the federal and provincial governments to provide services to our residents.
Just to give you a quick cross-section of our members, we have four first nations that have joined the project already and, as I said, there are 14 in our group. They have the same challenges as our other rural residents. Their high school students can't do their homework when they get home. They can do their homework in school, but when they get home they have to drive to McDonald's to upload their homework, and that's really, in my opinion, not acceptable in Canada.
We have a really unique partnership with the University of Guelph. There are three professors, approximately, who do broadband research in Canada, and Helen Hambly is one of them. Dr. Jamie Lee is also with us here today.
It's very important to us that we measure how effective public investment is in providing incentives for private sector to improve broadband. We're doing a longitudinal study. We started collecting data back in 2012. When our program is done in 2021, we should have some very interesting stats. Jamie will talk about that in just a moment.
We collect data from three main data sets. There's the MUSH sector, including all of the public places, because they're the ones that provide the most revenue to the providers at the beginning of the project. We've collected provider data. We know where all of the providers' fibre in southwestern Ontario is. We have it mapped in a GIS system. We're also collecting residential, farm, and business data from people by using a survey mechanism through the university.
Just to go on to give you a quick snapshot of the data we've collected, we've collected the provider data under NDAs, because, obviously, Bell's not interested in sharing with Rogers where their infrastructure lies. This is a disaggregated view of the data that I'm showing you now on the slide. This is Middlesex County in the centre of southwestern Ontario. The blue areas are within 500 metres of fibre, and the yellow areas are not. You can't deliver high-quality wireless without the tower being connected to the base with fibre. You can see that the folks in the yellow areas shown there are at a serious disadvantage. This is really overstating how well it is in Middlesex, because the fibre that's running along may not have enough capacity to actually break out to connect people.
I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Lee now, who is going to talk a bit about our analysis of the economic outcomes.