Mr. Mark Griffin:

To go back to the Deputy's earlier point, which we circulated with the briefing for the committee, that shows the challenges faced with a fixed wireless application. The comparison I like to make and with which all of us are familiar is that we built the M50 with two lanes. There are now four lanes on each side and it is still massively congested. The N7 is a disaster zone because we are putting on additional capacity.

One can take a short-term or a long-term perspective on this. We have taken a long-term perspective over a 25-year period. One of the fundamental issues for us is the technology we can put in place that will guarantee that in 25 years' time, irrespective of what happens between now and then, and we know there will be massive developments in terms of the ask of the public and businesses, including virtual and augmented reality, automated driving, remote surgery, artificial intelligence and precision farming, we will have a technology to cater for that.

We will not have to go back in a second time. We sometimes have a particular problem in the provision of infrastructure. In 2008, we thought that download speeds of 2.3 Mbps under the national broadband scheme were cutting edge, but by the time we started, it was out of date. However, this project will endure.

It is interesting to see the assessment that was made as to what one does in rural areas. One must look to what is happening in urban areas and the decision by Eir in the past few weeks to have a fibre overlay in all major cities and towns across the country. That will involve fibre to the home, not a cabinet. Siro, which has been assisted through the NBP process by virtue of the fact that the State brought forward legislation, is bringing fibre to the home. The question we must ask ourselves as administrators and politicians is whether we want to put something in place in rural Ireland that is sub-optimal and will simply further exacerbate the urban-rural digital divide. Even though we were technology neutral, we are clear that the fibre to the premises technology proposed by the bidder - interestingly, by all bidders - is the right direction to allow future proofing to be guaranteed.

There is a further statistic that may be of interest. The European Union did some work when it was scoping out the direction of travel up to 2025. Some 59% of respondents think they will need fixed download speeds of 1 Gbps in 2025, with only 8% of respondents saying they will need download speeds below 100 Mbps. It is the right thing to do.