Dr. Dónal Palcic:

Government subsidies can only cover a certain amount of capital expenditure. It seems that to get the up-front capital expenditure, Granahan McCourt is putting in more advanced technology now, which means that the refresh will happen later in the 2020s. Considering that such low take-up is projected in the early years, gold-plating the technology that it is putting in right now when it is assuming very low take-up would, according to Analysys Mason, represent a 25% additional cost compared with putting in the current technology when it is up and running with take-up increasing in the future. It could then do the typical refresh that any other Internet service provider would do in the mid-2020s and fund that from user revenues rather than from subsidised capital expenditure. If there was more competitive tension in the process, the company may have been forced to go with the lower cost capital expenditure to try to win the bid.