Mr. Marcus Matthews:

The statistics for businesses are different and reveal more of the needs that businesses require. Professional services oriented businesses typically require 0.5 Mbps for each employee as well as another 5 Mbps for live hosting of web conferences. This means that the vast majority of Irish businesses would function extremely well with a highly reliable Internet connection of 30 Mbps downstream, which is the minimum entry point of the NBP.

RISPA asked its members to present examples of the throughput needs of their business customers. Two cases stood out.

These cases had high demand or intensive applications, not necessarily just a professional services business. The first was an engineering business that had ten employees. It had a 15 Mbps symmetric Internet connection, meaning it was the same speed in both directions. The second case was a videographer who specialised in filming weddings in high definition and ultra-high definition, who had a 100 Mbps symmetric connection to support intensive uploading. In both of these instances, the needs of each business was met comfortably by the throughput of the Internet connection supplied. The question is why we are proposing to build this State-supported fibre optic network.