Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 2 October 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Estimates for Public Services 2018: Vote 29 - Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment

2:30 pm

Photo of Denis NaughtenDenis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am in a difficult position in that I am basing what I am saying on the information that has been presented to me. I am not directly involved in this procurement process. I am relaying the information I have received from the procurement team to the Deputy. The bidder, Granahan McCourt, issued a statement on 18 September outlining the people involved in this bid and their role. Any alteration to the make up of the consortium must go through an approval process within the Department and the procurement team.

In response to Senator O'Reilly's questions about the preparatory work by councils, some councils are very good. However, I think the Minister of State, Deputy Kyne, would agree with me that we are disappointed with some local authorities. We have been engaging with these local authorities. It is important that every local authority is ready to roll this out. The current roll-out with regard to the Eir network is happening across the country at the same time. The same thing will happen with regard to the roll-out of this. There will be timelines involved and targets to be achieved in the same way as Eir has had targets to meet.

At present, they have built out to 220,000 premises. The recent data submitted by Eir to the Department indicates the company has passed 180,000 premises nationwide as part of the rural deployment. However, the information received from Eir on its overall fibre deployment indicates that close to 220,000 premises have been passed throughout the country. That is the current state of play.

Senator Joe O'Reilly asked me whether those on the final phase of the national broadband plan will be the poor relation in terms of speed. In fact, the exact opposite is the case. The standard delivery that we are looking at is 150 Mb of download speed and 100 Mb of upload speed. A business would be able to avail of up to 1 Gbit of download speeds. These are very significant numbers. The reason is that at the start of this process the target for the definition of high-speed broadband was 30 Mbps. As I have consistently said throughout this, what we did not want is a situation when we awarded the contract that we would have a technology that was obsolete. That happened with the national broadband scheme previously. If we had been looking for a 30 Mbps download speed it would effectively be obsolete by the time we would complete the build-out. We have written into the procurement process that it must meet the changing demand. As the committee will be aware, the European Commission is setting demands of a gigabit society. We can accommodate this within the infrastructure that we are rolling out and we are determined to do that. I think I have answered those questions.

Senator Joe O'Reilly asked me about setting year-by-year targets. The draft NBP contract includes extensive governance and oversight mechanisms to ensure the efficient and effective roll-out of the network. These measures include monitoring of build-out milestones and key performance indicators on both a time and deployment area basis. Monitoring and reporting will occur monthly, quarterly and annually, a bit like the ongoing monitoring of the Eir contract.

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