Thank you, sir. Absolutely, I'd love to talk about that.
First and foremost, one of the main points I made is that we have these different buckets of funding all trying to solve the same problem. I think if we stepped back and designed a program from scratch as to how to fund broadband mainly in rural regions of Canada, we would not develop the current system we have. It doesn't make sense in a lot of cases, and it's not the most efficient system.
I think what we need to do is for the federal, the provincial and the municipal governments to collaborate. I really believe that the funding, like other infrastructure projects in Canada, is no different. The funding should be transferred from the federal government, getting it as close to the communities as possible through the provinces and letting them decide how to execute the programs in their provinces.
Having said that, it is vitally important that we have participation from all sizes of ISPs. In the SWIFT program alone, it's interesting to note that we have awarded about 20% of our funding to the national carriers. That's a small amount of our funding. Then 25% went to what we call the medium regional types of carriers such as Cogeco, for example, and the remaining 55% went to small ISPs. I'm sure you've never heard of some of these ISPs.
The third largest recipient of SWIFT funding is a small company out of Holstein, Ontario called EH!tel Networks. I suspect most people on this committee have never heard of them. I hadn't heard about them before I started this role either. They're a very small ISP, but like many of the other small ISPs, they're willing to stand up and provide service in areas where there is no business case necessarily for the larger incumbents to do that.
I think it's a mistake to look down upon the larger ISPs. They're businesses. They're profit-driven businesses, and that's okay. What we need to do is develop programs that allow them to continue to do what they do, but do it in lower density areas.