Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 16 July 2019
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment
National Broadband Plan: Discussion (Resumed)
Mr. Marcus Matthews:
Just to provide some more clarity, the policy in Ireland has been to auction spectrum nationally for the whole country. A multi-award model was examined for the 3.5 GHz element and that did divide up various areas. It was quite successful but it still covered huge chunks of the country. The United Kingdom, for example, has addressed this issue quite successfully and it has implemented a use it or lose it policy on spectrum. The mobile network operators can purchase vast blocks of spectrum to serve the urban and suburban areas they need. In the rural areas, however, where they do not tend to use the spectrum, what is happening is that regional ISPs purchase that auction for that region to use it in a service. It is quite a good model.
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