Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 14 February 2019
Public Accounts Committee
Imagine Communications Group
9:00 am
Mr. Sean Bolger:
If one looks at the roadmap for that, it is dimensioned to be way beyond that. We are talking about a shift here in what previously would have been considered as fixed wireless, the unlicensed spectrums and the legacy technologies.
We need to put this in context. No one in the world is spending billions building out 5G fixed broadband networks that are not future proofed. We would certainly not invest the kind of money we are investing if it was not future proofed. Future proofed means it will always meet the demands of the customers. One cannot put this kind of money to work in a market and think one will not keep up to standard and speed when something else such as fibre to home is coming. We must be clear about this. We are not saying not to build out the national broadband plan. We are saying it should be built out. We are building out a network in parallel commercially and we will not do that unless we are 100% confident that the service our customers will get today is seriously faster than what they currently experience - that is why they will choose it - and it will continue to meet their demands. The industry expectation now is that we will have 1 Gbps by the end of this year. When we see it, trial it and it is tested, I will believe it. The next thing is 10 Gbps. Nobody is building these networks for the short term. This is a major shift.
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