Thanks, Chair.
First of all, thank you to the witnesses for your time and for joining us today.
I want to take us to the land of broadband. We have arrived at a system in Canada now where the large carriers are building the infrastructure, what's on the poles and so forth, and then there's an ecosystem of smaller, newer carriers that are piggybacking on that infrastructure and charging lower rates. This is fine; this is a part of the element of competition that we're trying to reach.
An element of this, though, is that the competition is either more or less fair whether you're in an urban or a rural setting. In dense urban settings, it's not so much of a bite off of the large carrier's investment in the hard infrastructure, but in the rural areas where the infrastructure user per kilometre is much lower, it gets to be a little bit more painful.
There's the famous example that's been relayed to me a few times in a Canadian rural community where the large company provided the hard-wired infrastructure, including into an apartment building, but the enterprising university student living in the apartment building, after having the right business class, created his own carrier and was selling the Internet service to his neighbours more cheaply than the larger carrier could provide.
I invite you to muse with me about whether there is anything in the CRTC's domain or plans that would help to mitigate some of those variances in the degree of competition that emerges and that would make it a little fairer regarding urban or rural.