Finance committee  Mr. Chair, members of the committee, good afternoon, or evening, I suppose, at this point. I'm not working from prepared material, so I hope you'll accept my apology if I meander a little bit. I want to acknowledge that we're in support of the bill. We think this is a critical

Finance committee  Thank you. It's a fair question. The short answer is that the capital invested at the early stage of this company's history—which is actually Orascom, which has since been acquired by VimpelCom, was intended to be short-term, very expensive capital with a view to bringing on thi

Finance committee  Actually, I can answer the question.

Finance committee  I can be very brief. On the issue of the spectrum’s being set aside, it's actually a cap system. The incumbents have access to 75% of the good stuff; there's very little left over. What I would observe is that it is a bit rich to cry poor about the access in this upcoming aucti

Finance committee  Unquestionably. I can talk about tower sharing until 7:30 if people want me to, but what I'll say is that removing the restrictions as proposed isn't going to solve the tower-sharing issue. The truth is, capital is required. How you deploy that capital is a luxury to figure out o

Finance committee  So are we.

Finance committee  Yes, it's just a question of picking which part. As a practical matter, if AT&T, to use Mr. Bibic's example, were to come in and snap everyone up, they would have 45 MHz of spectrum relative to the 400 that the oligopoly has. It's not a question of how much capital you have

Finance committee  Yes. Bruce has put it exactly right; it is meaningless. Let's be clear, no one wants this change more than we do. No one wants the restrictions to be lifted to allow access to capital, and I say to you, absolutely seriously, don't bother making that change. It changes nothing f

Finance committee  It's that you need spectrum and you need capital. We also need capital to get spectrum, which is a distinction between us and the incumbents; they got it for free. But once you've got it, you have to deploy it, and that's hugely capital intensive.

Finance committee  Sir, I want to clarify one thing. When he says “all the rural areas”, what Mr. Bibic means is all the rural areas where you already have coverage, so nothing incremental to that.

Finance committee  Briefly, we will build out rurally when the economic case for it exists, and that is something that can only happen if there's access to capital and the attendant policy decisions that allow us to succeed and flourish so that we can expand. That's what competition is: you look fo

Finance committee  I don't want to hog the mike, but I'm happy to speak to it. In my view, you've already started to see the impact of competition. I could sit here and argue that competition creates lower prices and more innovation. I don't think that's even debatable. I think people recognize th

Finance committee  Very quickly on that, the reality is I don't think that the recently released policy will achieve anything in respect of covering areas that don't already have coverage. That's by definition because the so-called rural build requirement requires you only to cover your existing HS

Finance committee  Thanks. Very quickly on that, I think a lot of people probably wouldn't think it was a bad idea if AT&T did come up here. The simple reality is that what we're talking about, what Mr. Bibic is talking about, is 5 MHz of comparative spectrum. They have close to 400 MHz of spe

Finance committee  For Mr. Simms, where he already has Bell coverage, the practical realities are that he will get 700 MHz deployed if he happens to be within the 90% of the population coverage within that licence area in five years—97% after ten years. Again, just to return to the point, the acce