Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Let us park broadband for now. Mobile phones have been around for 25 years. This conversation about black spots could and should have been had by the Department 15 years ago. Some of the black spots identified ten years ago are still black spots today. I would contend that the principal cause of the problem in regard to mobile phone coverage is the State in allowing companies granted licences to provide less than optimal levels of cover. If a licence specifies 75% cover, it is not the fault of the company if it only meets that requirement, rather it is the fault of the State for setting the coverage requirement at that level. If a licence granted today requires an operator to provide only 75% coverage then in 15 years' time there will be lots of people complaining about not having a service. The reason we do not have the coverage is because the licence does not require it. If the licence required 100% coverage, that is what we would get.

I would like information from the Department on the operators, their licensing arrangements and the percentage of coverage by population and geographically over the lifetime of their renewals. I believe that when these operators were first granted these licences the percentage of coverage required was higher than is the case in the more recently issued licences. It could have been 90% but was reduced in new iterations to 80%, 78% and so on. This enables operators to cherry pick areas geographically. This was not only aided and abetted by the State but forced on the people by the State by not holding operators to a higher standard from day one. I accept that the Department is on a learning curve as a result of this failure and that it does not want to be caught with the same problem with broadband but we will come to that in a minute. Twenty-five years on, there are far too many black spots. I ask that the Department send to the committee data on the percentage of the population geographically in black spots. It is all very fine to talk about plans, communications and understanding the problem. The dogs in the street could have done that a decade ago.