Industry committee  Absolutely.

Industry committee  On steroids.

Industry committee  We're saying the minimum standard for connectivity has to continually be addressed. Otherwise you're benchmarking based on.... As Mike said, 1.5 megabits per second in the city would probably not be acceptable for most consumers.

Industry committee  We certainly have been active on the issue of antenna siting for the better part of a decade. We provided extensive remarks to a 2005 review of antenna-siting issues, which produced in the end the CPC. We had clear direction from our members that the Industry Canada regulations were not sufficient.

Industry committee  As far as we know, those are the numbers. We have been focusing not on coverage but on whether the coverage is sufficient to meet the demands of users, whether they be public sector, private sector, or consumers.

Industry committee  That may be.

Industry committee  I would add that it's CRTC policy already that where the market is not able to provide service on a market basis there would be targeted government funding to meet that gap. The federal government's position in previous funding programs, like Broadband Canada, has been based on that principle.

Industry committee  I should say personally that I've started to find towers quite attractive because I've spent so much time working on this issue in the last—

Industry committee  It's all I see when I drive down the highway. The reason we got involved on this issue of antenna siting was because our members said a couple of things to us. One, they needed to be notified of towers before they go up, so no more surprises. I'm sure you've all seen on CBC the stories of these 14.9-metre towers that miraculously appear.

Industry committee  It's a necessity. For government services, for consumers, for business, it's a necessity to have that connectivity, and for it to be real-time access as well.

Industry committee  What we're referring to here is the need to bring all the partners together—the federal and territorial governments, the private sector, the municipal sector—to look at a holistic strategy for developing ICT services in the north. Again, ad hoc funding programs have been very beneficial, but it would be far preferable to address it in a holistic manner.

Industry committee  Again, it's assessing what an acceptable minimum standard is. The CRTC, as I think was mentioned in the last hour, has made a decision that the minimum standard for all Canadians should be 5 megabits of service by 2015. Obviously, if you have a program that only delivers 1.5 megabits per second, which some of the programs under the Broadband Canada fund have done, there's a gap.

Industry committee  On the issue of tower sharing, FCM has had the position that co-location, which is the sharing of the tower, should happen as often as possible when the community wants it to happen. In an urban setting, sometimes if the land-use planning is trying to minimize the visual impact of the tower, you may not want co-location, because it tends to be more robust and have tiers of antennas.

Industry committee  It could be. We haven't assessed in any great detail the impact of the tower-sharing regulations. They were announced just last week. I'm not really able to speak on whether they'll have a certain impact. But there's a potential there that is welcome. In terms of the issue of competition, as I said, competition is important.

Industry committee  I'd encourage the committee to look at the ACIA report. It goes into specific examples of how federal departments are unable to deliver services in northern communities that they normally would in the south due to either insufficient bandwidth or lack of redundancy—or latency; if you only have a satellite connection, then you can't really do real-time entry into a database, because you have a four-second latency.