Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

I live in rural Ireland and I do not have copper wire because I built I built the house in the past 15 years. The majority of young families in rural Ireland that built homes in the past 15 years are using mobiles. I looked for a landline but there was an ESB line coming across something and I was told to build my own duct. I knew I would be obliged to pay for that. I asked myself what was the point and decided to use a mobile. This is how the USO for that worked. There were supposed to connect me but it did not happen because there was an issue. It is not as simple as it is being made out to be because the process involved is complex.

In the context of the 300,000 properties, there is an issue where Eir's connection costs are not the same as those for the intervention area. We know that the average cost of connections is much higher than within 50 m of the road because we are dealing with every extremity. In the case of the worst extremities, we estimated 2%. We stated that we might have to do wireless but that we are going to connect the rest. That 100% obligation is the key difference from the Eir proposal. The fundamental difference is that there is no state aid involved. However, let us forget about that for a moment. Eir is regulated for, at most, five years at a time. ComReg would confirm that it cannot give any assurances beyond five years that regulation can be relied upon to regulate Eir in respect of poles and ducting within a state aid environment. Everything in the obligations package regarding service quality, future proofing and capacity, service level agreements, clawbacks and the other provisions in the contract cannot, therefore, be done through regulation or the commitment agreement. One's whole contract is gone if one reaches a commitment-style agreement. Future-proofing was always a tenet of this. In April 2014, we stated that this is a long-term infrastructural investment on the part of the State and is therefore a long-term contract. Regulation does not do long-term contracts. That is a key point.

Another point-----