That's a good question. The backbone problem is going to eventually resolve itself. Whether it be SpaceX in a year, Telesat in two or three, or medium-earth orbit platforms from our partners at SES, the backbone capacity problem will never be resolved. We're going to continue to drive capacity through the roof. It will get easier and cheaper in the north. What we need now in rural Canada is to solve the training, the human resources, the job creation and the open gateway infrastructure, right?
If we build open gateways, meaning full location facilities and towers, and we put in fibre to the homes in those markets that make sense, put in the antennas we need for the last mile distribution and allow all competitors into that gateway, we could even structurally separate them like we do with an airport in a community. Rural Canada does not need a separate airport for every carrier. We need one airport for the community that all carriers share. It's the most effective way to do it.
Also, in space, we need a longer-term commitment to purchase capacity, because what happens is that we go through four-year beauty cycles, beauty contests, right? Every four years, when there's a change in government, there's a new funding program and a new strategy for broadband, which means that competitors like us, Northwestel and Bell are competing on a four-year program. Investing in the long term is difficult with a four-year program, and for satellite service providers, investing in capacity is very difficult. They're investing $100 million to $200 million in a platform with a 15-year life and with no financial commitment.
The challenge is to look at this holistically. The backbone solutions are coming and are getting cheaper. Competition on the backbone, whether it be fibre, SpaceX, Telesat or MEO from SES, is going to drive that price down.
What we need in rural Canada today is different from urban centres. In urban centres, yes, everybody can afford to build their own last mile and their own open gateways, their own gateways and their own towers, and they protect them fiercely. They don't want to share them. In rural Canada, you can't have that. You can't have five towers popping up in a community of 600 people. It's going to look goofy. It's not going to make sense.
We have this in Nunavut now. When we put in our building and Northwestel is across town, how do we pair with them? How do we share data with them? Well, somebody has to run fibre to the other guy. We want to, and they don't want any part of that, because they'd rather have our customers have to go all the way south by satellite and all the way back. This is not something I'm making up. This is something that is historically proven with fact and with programs.
We need open gateways in rural Canada. Competition will come, whether it be on the backbone or on the last mile. That open gateway is the barrier, the moat, to little companies like ours, and we're not so little anymore. We're 100 people spread across the country, but we started as one person in a little town. Luckily, we had the funding to build the infrastructure that we're building, but we firmly believe in open gateways and competition in the marketplace—any marketplace.