Mr. John O'Dwyer:

The Deputy is correct. That discussion in the UK is happening as we speak. There is a debate. The universal service is looking at 10 Gbps, which is lower than is being required here, although in practice a lot of the technologies would give one 30 Gbps or above anyway. It is going down the road of this universal service approach to it. One of the things which may be quite useful here is that BT has put forward a proposal in the UK to pragmatically look at the remainder. One of the things that has happened is it has looked at introducing this from 2020. It is saying that in 2020 it thinks it will be short of meeting the 100% coverage by approximately 600,000 premises - very similar to the numbers here, to be honest. It thinks it will be short by that amount.

What BT, our parent company, has done is make a proposal. It is in the public domain and is on the Ofcom website. It has made a proposal, which is being discussed with the regulator as part of consultations, etc. It has looked at it pragmatically. It has said it is a lot of customers and has asked how it can do this quickly and pragmatically. It said, "Well, let us look at radio.". It has asked if 4G or 5G can help, because that can be rolled out very quickly and it has already got a lot of coverage, could work. It reckons it could cover approximately 450,000 of that 600,000 with radio technology, like 4G and 5G. EE, the company we also own, runs very good 4G. It reckons it could get on average approximately 30 Mbps downstream, which, actually, is the specification for the NBP download speeds.

It said, "Well, okay, that is the first 450,000. Let us look at the next piece of it. We are 150,000 short." It asked what it could do now and it set a threshold." It is £3,200, or something of that order. It asked what it could do within that. In terms of a price range of £3,200, it could pay for itself. It said that it could probably do 40,000 and pay that itself commercially without too much of a hit and that it would recover that eventually. It would then be down to 110,000. At the moment, there is a discussion - it may not be arguing but debating - how do one deals with the 110,000. It has taken a very pragmatic approach of chunking it to see what it can do rather than saying that it is just a big number, it is a big problem, let us break the problem down and see how we can split it up. That is roughly what is going on.