Mr. Jeremy Godfrey:

The Deputy asked about the monthly price and how it compares with the prices regulated by ComReg. I will provide a little bit of background on that. The key product we are discussing here is virtual unbundled access, VUA. This is the high-speed broadband connection between the customer premises and the local hand-over point, which in the Eircom network will be the local telephone exchange. A retail service provider can either provide its own backhaul from the exchange or it can buy a bundle of the VUA products together with backhaul. Back in December ComReg finished a review of the wholesale local access market, of which VUA is the key product. As part of that we set a price, as the Deputy has mentioned, for VUA provided over fibre to the cabinet, FTTC, infrastructure. This is the €19.54 price referred to by the Deputy. It is for fibre to the cabinet. As I said earlier, we did not set a fixed price for VUA provided to the home infrastructure, which is the 300,000 premises. Eircom has also announced that it is planning to roll out a much more extensive fibre to the home infrastructure in the areas where it currently has fibre to the cabinet infrastructure. We did not set a fixed price for that and have given Eir pricing flexibility for the reasons I have mentioned. As well as the difficulties in setting a price, it also gives Eir the possibility to choose a pricing approach that is best calculated to drive penetration on that network. I can inform the committee that the prices do not have a single price for fibre to the home product. There are a range of prices depending on the speed.