It's important to understand that we're seeing worldwide, including in southern Canada, telecommunications advancing in leaps and bounds, while in the north we're back to the highest level of speeds pre-Starlink, which is now starting to come in. Through our major ISP, it is 15 megabits per second, versus the previous five for speed.
Even with the almost $50-million investment that the Government of Canada made to upgrade our telecommunications, it's very vulnerable to weather, so any time there's a blizzard, rain or clouds, it can go down to literally zero. It hampers our ability to participate in online learning for children who were trying to connect to their kindergarten to grade 12. It hampers the ability of our post-secondary students to attend. It hampers our ability to do e-health and e-commerce.
There are times when you can be at the grocery store and the Internet goes down, and you can't pay for your groceries or you can't pay for your gasoline. Of course, you can't go to the bank and the ATM to get cash. It's so consistently unpredictable. When the Rogers network went down this past summer in Canada, that is our reality several times a week. You literally cannot do anything with respect to communications. We're so dependent on telecommunications for governance and providing information to our residents. The community access program was shut down at the library, so residents who have no computer or connectivity at home couldn't get information on the pandemic.
It really is critical infrastructure, and it is now recognized by several countries around the world as a human right.