Industry committee  Thank you for having us. Thanks for your time today, committee. We at SWIFT in southwestern Ontario believe that broadband really should be an essential utility. We cannot participate in the modern economy today without it. We believe that SWIFT is the solution that is in place

Industry committee  I'm at seven minutes. Would you like me to stop, Mr. Chair?

Industry committee  One more minute would do it.

Industry committee  Okay. The way we are approaching this is to take a typical rural area where there is some existing fibre and a lot of services, and we are augmenting that fibre optics with the fibre optics that we're subsidizing, which will be owned by the private sector. The key to this is that

Industry committee  In my opinion, SWIFT is a very regional project. It covers a lot of Canada's population, but it's actually a fairly compact area. We are a not-for-profit model, and we don't own the infrastructure, but our needs, which are the community's needs, are taken into account. It's not j

Industry committee  We are following the broader public sector procurement guidelines, absolutely, because we've been funded by public funds. We've taken our large area and split it into about 30 smaller areas so that smaller providers are able to compete with larger providers when we do release RFP

Industry committee  Bell Canada announced last year that its spending $1.1 billion in Toronto, and has just announced $50 million in Sarnia and $45 million in Windsor. You'll notice the similarities, in that they're spending in high-density urban areas. In fact, even within the boundary of the city

Industry committee  We have 28 providers that were pre-qualified to bid on our proposals. We are doing our core and aggregation...on the street right now. We had five companies come forward and make an offer to bid. We are getting very significant interest from the private sector, but we have a larg

Industry committee  We are very much a fibre-only project, so spectrum really doesn't enter into our conversation. I will say one thing, though. We've been funded through the small communities fund, and one of its requirements is that any infrastructure we fund must be open access. Facilities-based

Industry committee  No, it's not enough. Our project area was awarded $180 million in 2016, and that is a good start, just for southwestern Ontario. When you look at the north, it has enormous challenges, much worse than Saskatchewan even has. One of the things that I think would make it easier for

Industry committee  Our governance model is very similar, yes.

Industry committee  Our model is different from EORN's in that the only technology we are going to subsidize is fibre. We believe it's the only long-term infrastructure that has the scalability for future needs. I must say that we don't think of 5-1 or even 50-10, because that's today's number, and

Industry committee  It took us six years to get our first funding envelope. The municipality spent about a million dollars on studies and things like that. That was long. For the private sector capital, we've done some analysis, so our project subsidizes cap funding for the providers up to 66%. The

Industry committee  I think open access is one of the key tenets. The CRTC has forborne issuing regulations on the transit between points and, now, with the disaggregated model, competitive providers that want to deliver services to a local area have to buy their transit on the open market, back to,

Industry committee  When we look at any normal rural area, there are services and buildings. The white square on this slide has the points of presence, and those are owned by private providers today. Let's say the outside ones are Bell Canada and some of the spurs are some smaller providers. All tho