Industry committee  Hello.

Industry committee  If I understand correctly, you want us to present our project and to talk about what we are doing in our rural areas. More than three years ago, the RCM of Montcalm began a project to deploy a fibre-optic network to homes. Fifteen years ago, as part of a provincial program calle

Industry committee  It was a very quick summary.

Industry committee  Is it scalable? One of the things that are very important in our case is that it was decided to serve only the territory of the MRC, so there was no plan at all when they created the not-for-profit organization to expand and serve other communities. Within the community, currentl

Industry committee  Yes, we actually have supported a number of issues for the benefit of all RCMs. In Quebec, RCMs were strong participants in the first wave of applications under the Digital Canada 150 program and the Connect to Innovate programs. Several tens of millions of dollars have been pai

Industry committee  Because of the infrastructure?

Industry committee  There are rental charges associated with the infrastructure. Without going too much into the technical details, I'll say that renting poles is very expensive, and this directly influences the feasibility of a business model. New infrastructure is very expensive as well, but in ou

Industry committee  The rate policy is yet to be defined, but it will allow us to compete. The principle behind such a policy is to be able to offer services at a reasonable price.

Industry committee  They only do so with regard to support structures.

Industry committee  If we left what?

Industry committee  No, it's the opposite.

Industry committee  These regions haven't been covered for 50 years, and there's no reason why they would get coverage overnight. This has nothing to do with the private sector. It has everything to do with the economic model. Everybody talks about density, that if they don't have enough density

Industry committee  I can't directly answer your question because I don't know all of the data.

Industry committee  Yes, one of the major problems we have is the difficulty in identifying who really has the service and who does not. In our case, when we started to look and wanted to apply to the first program, what we got for the MRC was $4.7 million. This time we have multiple clients who are

Industry committee  I've been in the business forever and I've seen the evolution from copper to everything else. I think there's only one means to be able to have a sound investment for Canadians for the long term, and it's a wire. It's the photon going into a tube of glass. Nothing else can beat i