Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

It is not the same as a public private partnership, PPP, where a road is built. In this instance, we went to the market and at the time it was €757,000. We never published any figure on how much the State might put into the project because we did not want to lead the bidders. We simply went to the market and stated we wanted high-speed broadband of at least 30 Mbps, we did not name a technology, and we stated we wanted the market to tell us how design, build and operate it and to tell us how much money the operators might want from the State to do this and live by the contract for 25 years, knowing they might have 300,000 or 400,000 customers over that 25 year period at €30 or €40 a head. This was the task put forward to the bidders that qualified, three of whom were at the table. They told us they believed the predominant technology should be fibre and they told us how they would design it. All three gave us very different designs but similar operations because they would be selling the same services and all three gave us very different financial models of how it would be financed. At the invitation to submit detailed solutions stage in September 2017, we got a number from two operators on how much money they thought the State would have to put into the project and how much they would put into it. That was called a dummy run of the bid. We had two numbers at that point. This is where we are today. The contract, which has 1,500 pages, has strict obligations for them to show us their designs for each of the 100 areas of 5,000 premises throughout every part of the country and that must be proven before it is built.