Thank you, Madam Chair.
This is all a new experience for me over the last month with Zoom meetings and things like that, and I appreciate the opportunity to be able to discuss St. Clair Township's Internet coverage before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
As you said, my name is Mayor Steve Arnold. I represent a community that has a population of approximately 15,000 people within 640 square kilometres, and our western border is the United States. They're less than half a kilometre away from us.
The balance of the property that we have is approximately 90% rural and 10% urban. Half of our assessment, and also half of our water usage, is based on heavy industry, which is well serviced by fibre optic cable. Because they're big customers, everybody wanted to make sure they were serviced.
In 2011, I was part of the western wardens who established the SWIFT initiative in southwestern Ontario. We also started trying to entice high-speed Internet providers in 2004 in our municipality to expand service to commercial and light industrial companies, and to our residences in areas outside of where our industrial complexes were. During that time, from 2004 to 2019, we have worked with eight different providers with limited success. Usually what happens is that they get all excited, and they come and charge you $60 to see whether or not you have a strong enough through-the-air signal, and 90% of the time you don't. You pay your $60, and they say sorry and go back to wherever they came from.
The residents who currently have Internet, even in our more built-up area, which is Corunna, they get it through the cable providers at 45 megabits per second transfer speeds, and anybody else who can get anything through the airwaves gets between five and seven megabits per second transfer speeds, but if you do your checks, on the lower end, it's usually around 0.5 to one, which makes it pretty well impossible to do anything.
I'm told that downloads of larger files can take from two hours to two days for movies and homework. I've had teachers call me to complain because now they have to do online learning, due to the COVID stuff, and it's just impossible to get it out to the rural communities. Even on the Internet that I have—I use a satellite connection—I'm getting slow speed detections that are shutting me down and taking me offline for sometimes a couple of days at a time. It's very frustrating for us.
There are a number of households that I've been contacted by that are now using two providers in order to get enough service to complete even simple tasks. With our proximity to the United States, signal piracy is common. Canadian providers install a new through-the-air tower, and then the reception and transfer becomes as poor as prior to the installation. They're very entrepreneurial when you cross the international boundary close to us.
However, the good news is that we are very pleased to have been successful in working with Cogeco to receive a SWIFT fibre optic cable project and grant, which will service our most under-serviced and largest population outside of our village of Corunna. It is their hope that we will see this project completed within 18 to 30 months. It's a $5.8-million project and it will provide service to approximately 30% of our total land mass and approximately 5,000 more residents than we currently have serviced. However, we will still be limited....
Am I done? Okay. Thank you very much.