James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I missed the presentation because I was attending another meeting, but I read our guests' proposal and submission. I have a great deal of sympathy for the approach being proposed for a number of reasons. One is that I have worked in my constituency with a number of providers for a number of years. The NBP has been around for as long as I have been in active politics. It has not been delivered but certainly has been doing the rounds. I have worked with many different ISPs and have seen many different approaches and what has worked with communities where, perhaps, more technically proficient members of a community group used various ad hocapproaches and tried to improvise with varying degrees of success. I know from experience that there can be multiple ways to achieve broadband penetration into rural areas. It is not just fibre. There are many different technologies that work reasonably well.

One of the bugbears I had with the NBP was that these were not tried in further and greater measure. It is something I have said many times in this committee and in the Dáil. I have published legislation on it. The former Minister, Deputy Naughten, largely agreed with my legislation. In drafting a Bill and in various different testimonies such as this, I have said that it appears we are trying to do this the wrong way around. We are subsidising the winner of the tender to go into all the intervention areas. We are paying it a great deal of money to provide Internet to areas that cannot get it. Rather than stating that we will accept this as a given and we will give somebody a subsidy to do it, we should be asking why it is not happening already, why there is a market failure, understand the reasons for the market failure and tackle those reasons and the planning, regulatory and sharing of site anomalies. All sorts of things have been inventoried in the various task lists of different committees over the last number of years and I tried to tackle some of them in my legislation. Rather than saying we will fix all those issues, gripes and glitches and then see if the intervention area gets smaller, which it invariably would, we have taken an approach of saying there is a big black hole in an area so we will give loads of money to somebody to go and fill it.

As I said, I have a great deal of sympathy with the proposal. I agree with many of the points made. I am not convinced that we are achieving economies of scale with the current approach. By giving one tenderer a pay cheque to do it, we are not allowing for improvements in technology. There is no incentive to improve the process. There is no incentive to deal with a glitch between two different local area plans side by side in two different counties which have the same border. They are competing area plans. There is no incentive to choose the site sharing possibility. Instead of there being a common mast that is reused by many providers everyone puts up their own. There is no incentive to ducting along the side of a motorway. I understand it is cheaper to dig up the road and put in new ducting rather than reuse what is already there because of the rates the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform charges for access to ducting on the motorways. With all these crazy catches, there is no incentive to tackle them because we are going to give somebody loads of money to do it regardless. I have many issues with the proposed approach.

I have sympathy for what our guests are saying. They seem to be indicating, if I am reading their proposals correctly, more or less what I have just stated, namely, that there is a different way we can do it. One of the ways they are proposing contains a compromise of sorts. They are saying they will not give fibre to every home but that they will provide a variety of technologies, primarily broadband radio according to the submission. Perhaps there are other technologies as well. Perhaps there is a degree of fibre with the last mile being radio and perhaps a little 5G in the mix as well. The witnesses are indicating there is not, so it is primarily broadband radio, fixed wireless. They are saying they will do that and have a minimum standard of 150 Mbps. That will be delivered in two years at a cost €402 million. That is extraordinarily good value for money and an extraordinarily attractive proposition.

I am coming at it with an extremely sympathetic perspective. It bears out my direct experience as a councillor and then a Deputy working with companies in my area and working with local authorities and so forth. However, if something is too good to be true, it usually is. I would love to think this is the way forward, and there are many reasons that it might be, but if it was so obvious how come it is not happening?