CTS 2009: Getting broadband to everyone is no easy feat

TORONTO – “This is our market,” said Barrett Xplore CEO John Maduri, pointing to a slide on the screen. What we saw during the Canadian Telecom Summit session on Building Broadband was a satellite view of a wide swath of farmland that contained just a handful of homes. Would anyone in their right minds run fibre to those customers? Unlikely, said Maduri, who said the region in the photo was just five kilometres outside the city limits of Waterloo. While we can sometimes assume the face of rural broadband only looks like communities isolated by hundreds of miles of highway...