Ms Carolan Lennon:

It was the ISDS. It was a technical bid - Eir's technical solution. In that bid, we included all the costings that were required, including the cost of the ducts and poles and the cost of the wholesale team. We included all of the costs as part of it, which made it an expensive bid.

We were still hoping to get those matters addressed.

The other issue was that we made some assumptions around uptake. I do not know what the assumptions of National Broadband Ireland, NBI, around uptake are but in preparation for bidding for the NBP, we did a survey of the intervention area to try to understand how many of the homes were occupied because uptake depends on people living in the properties. According to the data we got back, about 25% of the houses were not occupied but were holiday homes and so forth. We based our uptake assumptions on that figure of 75% rather than 100%. That is obviously a factor with regard to the gap funding model. That was part of the technical submission showing how we were going to do it. Getting down to the negotiation was meant to be in that final commercial bid when one signed up to the terms and conditions.