Mr. Patrick Neary:

We definitely looked at mixing the technologies and having different percentages of fixed wireless and fibre. Other technologies were considered as well. We looked at having a predominant solution, say, fibre and then the delta being used by a fixed wireless, say, 20%, 5%, etc. We have looked at lots of different variants of this.

Going back to what Mr. Ó hÓbáin was hinting at there, when one deploys a fixed-wireless network, one may pick up a number of homes through that deployment but, ultimately, one needs to bring fibre out to the backhaul in those particular sites and one is building a lot of fibre to those particular sites anyway. What one finds, if one mixes that then with a fibre deployment, is one ends up building a lot of the same infrastructure anyway because a fixed-wireless service will not take every contiguous home along a road. It might take 60% or 70% and then one must still build the fibre down the same road to get to the last three. One is not substantially reducing the fibre cost by introducing an overlay of a fixed-wireless network. It is not a case where one can say, "Okay, I will do this section here with fixed wireless and all of those premises are then removed, and then I will do the remainder with fibre." One is overlaying two networks, one on top of the other.

We have done a lot of analysis on what works best. Ultimately, we have had serious teams of bidders with real in-depth technical expertise examining the same question. Two of the bidders have mobile arms - Eir and Vodafone, which was backing the SIRO bid. They had serious mobile expertise and wireless expertise to draw upon to look at that as well, and they all concluded that a predominantly fibre-to-the-home network is the best way to do this.

Obviously, we looked at a full fixed-wireless access topology deployment as well. Independent of the Department, ComReg's Plum report shows that more than 4,500 new masts would require to be deployed. The deployment time of that is quite substantial. They estimated it was well over ten years.

We would look to how the bidder has come to the conclusion. We have examined that thoroughly to see have they robustly examined the variance. That certainly was part of our analysis.