Mr. Martin List-Petersen:

Open Eir has not used fibre in urban areas. They have used fibre to the cabinet. They are using copper technologies. The 1.7 million premises of their roll-out use copper. Of those, a large chuck are sub-30 Mbps. On top of that, because there is an issue where some of the copper lines still do not go to the nearest cabinet and they go to the exchange, to cabinets miles away, etc., which has not solved anything. That is why Open Eir has turned around, because it has this old legacy network that dates back 20 years or even more, and said that the only way it will fix this is by now also going fibre. This is what they do traditionally.

Open Eir, or, in its traditional sense, Eircom, also always had a nationwide 3.5 GHz licence. They have run WiMax trials. They have had customers on WiMax. They have never run the product because they are a traditional telecommunications company. SIRO, on the other hand, sprang out of ESB Networks. They are using ESB Networks power lines. Basically, the easiest way for them was fibre. It is down to the scalability with that. This is all urban. What we are talking about here is the national broadband plan, which is all rural. SIRO has nothing in such rural scenarios. It is cities, towns and villages to a certain extent. It makes a whole lot of sense with fibre there because if one runs with radio links and one does not have the spectrum to run non-line of sight, then one has houses in the way everywhere. In an urban scenario, one would need non-line of sight spectrum, and one would need a lot of it to do it, which is what the mobile network operators do. In an urban scenario, even though one has a 4G signal, often one does not have a lot of bandwidth because there are just too many people and there is not enough spectrum.