Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 18 November 2020

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

National Broadband Plan Roll-out: Discussion

Mr. Peter Hendrick:

I can comment and Mr. Malone can add some colour. As he described, with such projects we start with survey and design and looking to get them accelerated. Once we start on the build programme, it is industrialised and it is about building efficiencies into it.

The first deployment of 19,500 homes is under active construction right now and there are 76,000 premises given to contractors to start the build programme. We are making good progress into the 2021 and 2022 programme. That will build up as contractors mobilise and we go from having 800 people today on the project up to 1,800 people over the next 15 months. We will add 1,000 people to the programme in that time. That extra resource will help us get to the steady state industrialised programme of build. It is our desire, ambition and experience from other projects that once we get our systems and processes industrialised, we should be able to make some acceleration just in the normal course of a build programme. In addition, we are looking at other opportunities and alternatives for acceleration.

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