Mr. Patrick Neary:

I will address that question as I go through the mapping process and it should become very clear. I will start at the beginning and members will note as the map has developed, the way in which operators have come forward with their plans. Our first engagement with the industry started in 2013 when we wrote to all the operators and asked them for submissions relating to high-speed broadband and their intent to roll out it out. That resulted in us publishing a first iteration of the map in November 2014. That was sent out for public consultation, following that extensive engagement with the industry in 2013 and 2014.

We received 27 responses representing more than 60 stakeholders in that consultation, therefore, we got quite a healthy response particularly from the industry. That resulted in us republishing the map in February 2014. We then issued a supplementary information request to the industry inviting operators to come forward with any detail of any further high-speed broadband plans they had out to 2020. It was very much a future-looking request for information. In that year, June 2015, Eir came forward with, and announced publicly, a 300,000 roll-out. At that point it would have submitted its submissions to the Department. Along with that, in response to that information request, six operator plans were submitted to us. Therefore, Eir had made a submission, along with five others. At the end of 2015 we concluded that no operator had met the technical deployment or financial criteria or was willing to sign a commitment agreement at that point. On that basis, we republished the map in December 2015 and at that point we launched the procurement. In 2016 Eir re-engaged with the Department. It had updated its 300,000 plan, come forward with more robust and committed finance for the project and revised its deployment profile, which had started or was planned to start during 2016. In fact, it started towards the end of 2016.

Throughout 2016 we reassessed that updated plan from Eir. During that year we also continued to monitor and assess the anticipated commercial developments in what, at that time, was the blue area on the map.

To complete the picture, through our analysis of the blue area we identified a further 84,500 premises which we had anticipated would get high-speed broadband but the plans were not forthcoming as anticipated. We decided at the time that those 84,500 premises should revert to the intervention area. We continued engagement with Eir, and in April 2017 we signed a commitment agreement which underpinned its plan to deliver high-speed broadband to 300,000 premises. Eir had started the roll-out at the end of 2016 and had already completed the first quarter of roll-outs during 2017, so it was well down the road of actually implementing the deployment. This supported the credibility of its plan, along with the fact it underpinned the commitment through an agreement with the Minister and the Department. In April 2017, this resulted in us updating the map, which now included the further 84,500 premises we had identified through analysing the blue areas. The intervention area was reduced by 300,000 premises as a result of the commitment agreement with Eir. This gave us an intervention area of approximately 540,000 premises. As has been pointed out, April 2017 was during the ongoing procurement process and I will come back to this.

We continually analyse issues regarding accuracy of the map and issues in the blue areas. As recently as January we asked for further observations on the map through a public consultation, which concluded last week. We received nine responses directly on the mapping and we are reviewing and assessing those respondents. The point I want to make is the mapping process is extremely complex. We are attempting to map high-speed broadband nationally to every house in every eircode in the country. In many cases, this information is based on the legacy copper network and the information is quite old. We have had to do a lot of analysis and work with various operators to try to improve the accuracy of what is there. There are many difficulties in identifying the performance of high-speed broadband at individual premises level. At the point a premises orders and connects to the service it becomes more measurable. We have had cases where one would expect that houses built close to a cabinet would receive high performance high-speed broadband direct from that cabinet, but when they connect it is identified they are not connected to that cabinet but to an exchange several kilometres away. As a result, they do not receive the expected performance levels. There are difficulties such as these.

Various technology is involved and there are different ways of measuring the performance dependent on the technology. It is a very complex process. We have developed the map to be dynamic and to respond to our analysis as we develop it over a period of time. We have been doing it for quite a long time and it is getting better and better. As people connect to it, we get better insight into the performance they receive. We are continually updating and reassessing the accuracy of the map. We have allowed for this within the procurement process, and from the outset we very much flagged the dynamic nature of the map. When we updated the map in April 2017, it was not something unflagged to bidders at the start of the procurement process. It was catered for in the procurement process.