Industry committee  Yes, absolutely. You have that understanding, but certainly one of our great challenges here is not just speed but actual bandwidth, so even if you're in a community that has better speed that's served by fibre, it's the bandwidth that ends up bringing you to a grinding halt.

Industry committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. I really can't stress enough that the gaps we see in the north are limiting our ability to grow and participate in the global economy and to move our challenges ahead with respect to education, health, and all those sorts of thi

Industry committee  Certainly Community Futures has been very active in the north and is very well received. It has the opportunity to bring a lot of different types of partners together.

Industry committee  It's really not an issue for our communities, so I'll leave that to you.

Industry committee  Our emphasis is definitely on backbone. We don't even have the speeds coming into the community, let alone being able to participate. Until that backbone is addressed, the last mile is irrelevant.

Industry committee  Certainly with northern and remote communities being so isolated, you would be relying on it so much more and would be able to participate so much more if you had it. It is bordering on a right, for sure.

Industry committee  I'm not sure.

Industry committee  We have one service provider for most of the territories, with another smaller group as well in Nunavut and part of the N.W.T. I'm not sure exactly where the threshold is, but it does require significant subsidies to even deliver a land line type of phone service. This is not a p

Industry committee  Yes, that's correct. We are almost exclusively diesel, and there is some hydro in the southern part of the territories.

Industry committee  No. There are some on dial-up, but even when you're not on dial-up, you're still looking at significantly slow speeds. You can't stream. Often video conferencing is a real challenge. The delays with the satellite links just complicate that.

Industry committee  Ten of our 33 communities are still on satellite service. They would be the slowest. From a percentage perspective, it's not as high. Yellowknife, for example, is over half of the population of the NWT. Percentage-wise it doesn't speak to it as well.

Industry committee  Absolutely. We'd like to think so.

Industry committee  Thanks very much. It's not so much a percentage as it is.... We do have coverage in most communities. We don't have the same rural base in most communities, but the speeds are so slow that it makes it almost impossible to participate using Internet for health, education, and tho

Industry committee  Do you remember dial-up?

Industry committee  That's what we're looking at.