Industry committee  Now's the time, right? I think that they haven't maintained all of their infrastructure very well.

Industry committee  Yes. When a pole leans more than five degrees, it needs to be changed.

Industry committee  Yes. The fact that we work with municipalities helps us a lot, because they give us the rights of way. We can just start digging in the streets, you know—

Industry committee  The battle is endless. These costs are—

Industry committee  There are also maintenance fees, which are very high.

Industry committee  Yes, that's what we call them.

Industry committee  Absolutely. The engineers will redo a design, realign the poles, decide to change the lines, and send us the bill, which we have to pay in full. The bill is one thing, but the time it all takes is another. We are told that it will be done, but that our area isn't a priority.

Industry committee  First, I think that we should have realistic costs when we do maintenance work; the costs should therefore be standardized. We should say that a pole costs $1,500, and not $4,500 as is sometimes the case.

Industry committee  That's engineering. Each project is evaluated and is given an identification number. I don't know if you remember a process called “special assembly”, which was a black box at the time in telecommunications. Things went in on one side, and came out on the other, and it cost $100,

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

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  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.