Thank you again.
You're right. I could go on and on about the universal broadband fund and connecting the country. As I said, since 2015, we've connected 1.7 million households. By 2026, we're going to connect another 1.2 million households.
We have many tools in our tool box, to use my colleague's term. We have the connect to innovate program. We have the CRTC broadband fund. We have the Canada Infrastructure Bank. Of course, we have the universal broadband fund and we have our low-earth orbit satellite. Between all those programs, we are going to get every Canadian connected by 2030 and 98% by 2026.
With the rapid response stream that we put out in response to the pandemic, we knew we had to get people connected. I'm so proud of the department. The first project went out within six weeks. As I alluded to earlier, they have just under 2,000 programs now and applications that they're assessing. We'll make sure that we put on the affordability lens, the best hardware that can be scalable as our speeds go from 50/10 and higher.
I'm proud of the work that's being done. I know that we are going to honour our commitments to get Canada connected, and I hope we can say it before 2030.