Mr. Pat Kidney:

I need to emphasise the extent of the settlement pattern and how that influences these partial models. The figures for inhabitants per square kilometre in rural Ireland are pretty low and I believe they stand at 27. That does not tell the whole story, however. It is about road frontage and we were quite amazed when we did the analysis on this as part of a wider team. We have built along roads in a way that is amazingly consistent all over the country. Houses tend to be built over stretches of a couple of kilometres, with four or five in a row and then a gap until another four or five. There is a linear distribution of houses and premises in rural areas and this does not lend itself to a high site. We could end up building a high site that would only cover tens of homes and we may still miss some of them due to the topography and foliage etc., meaning we would have to build out to those houses. We did considerable work on this across the entire intervention area in every village and small cluster. We looked at going 1.5 km from each village and took four case studies. We looked at a detailed design of what would happen if we were to build out to homes and premises in this way. It left us with orphaned premises and 16% of them would fall out of coverage as a result. It is a considerable challenge to deploy wireless in an overlay sense. When people suggest 20% wireless, it would not be in an area contiguous to a village. It would be spread all over the place and would be difficult to get to. When the bidders came in they started looking at wireless and two of them had related wireless entities, but they decided on a 100% fibre solution. It comes down to road frontage and the settlement pattern in rural Ireland, consistently across the country.