Mr. Jeremy Godfrey:

This is my first opportunity to give evidence to the committee. I thank the committee for that opportunity and assure it that I, like my colleagues, will do my best to assist the committee in its work.

The next slide shows how broadband penetration has grown over the years in comparison with the EU average. As the committee will see, the penetration has grown fairly steadily. It has now reached 67%, which is a little below the EU average but which is fairly typical. By comparison, Italy is at 68% and Spain is at 69%. In fact, one third of the EU member states are within three percentage points of Ireland. Ireland is a fairly typical marketplace. In general, penetration is driven by demand rather than by the supply side. It is highly correlated, for example, with developments such as PC penetration.

Another way in which we look at the success and how the market is operating is how competition has delivered improved prices for consumers and an indicator of that is the communications sub-index in the CPI. That sub-index mostly comprises telecommunications services, both fixed-line and mobile. One will see that over the past two years - this chart begins in 2012 - the CPI in general has grown by approximately 1% whereas there has been quite a substantial drop in the communications sub-index, which has been driven by the aggressive competition. As Mr. O'Brien mentioned, there have been new entrants into the broadband market in that time. There has also been some aggressive competition in the mobile market. Typically, now we are seeing broadband and voice bundles priced at €40 per month or a little more, with some fairly aggressive offers for new customers such as discounts for the first six months. The market has worked fairly well in bringing down over the past two years.

The next slide shows how competition and investment have led to an increase in broadband speeds: the red block at the top represents the highest speed services - ones with greater than 30 megabits per second, Mbps; the green one represents between 10 Mbps and 30 Mbps; the blue, between 2 Mbps and 10 Mbps; and the grey ones at the bottom are the ones that are less than 2 Mbps. The biggest trend one sees here is the growth in the higher-speed service as a percentage of services sold in Ireland. One will see that the red block took off at the beginning of 2013. That coincided with the launch of Eircom's next-generation access, NGA, service. Half of the growth in that percentage since then is due to Eircom and half of it is due to those having higher speeds on the cable network.

Mr. O'Brien spoke of how some of the players in the market have their own infrastructure and some use others' infrastructure. The next slide shows how the different platforms or underlying technologies are being used. At the bottom, the dark blue box and the golden line just above it are both technologies that make use of the Eircom copper network. The gold line is the higher-speed NGA version where the copper is combined with fibre - the fibre goes to a cabinet and the copper goes into the premises. The blue box is the older generation of technology where the copper goes all the way back to the exchange. The golden one is a higher-speed service; the blue one is a lower speed service. One is beginning to see how there has been migration in that platform, from the blue to the gold. At the retail level, the blue and gold services are not only sold by Eircom; they are also sold by other providers.

The green box in the middle is the cable network, which is now a high-speed network. At the top, there are a number of wireless technologies. I should say that the light blue one, which is described as mobile broadband, represents dongles that one plugs into one's laptop or computer. Those with smart phones also can get fairly high-speed Internet but those are not included in these figures. This refers to wireless mobile broadband. The grey at the top is the fixed wireless operators.

Finally, on how the marketplace has become more competitive, one can see that Eircom still remains the market leader, but with considerably less than a 50% market share in broadband. Vodafone and Sky are both players which largely operate by reselling the Eircom copper network and they have taken quite a lot of share in the past couple of years. The other big player is UPC on the cable network. The competition amongst all of those players has both driven investments in higher-speed services and the reductions in prices we noted previously. With that, I will hand back to Mr. O'Brien to talk about mobile.