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 will start by giving an update on reliability and Mr. Malone might talk about the construction and rights of way. In line with our programme, part of the reason the build is taking so long is we are making the existing infrastructure fit for purpose. We are replacing a significant number of poles throughout the country. We are bringing into account what the network needs to be for the next 25 or 35 years and beyond. Poles, typically, will stand for anything from 40 to 50 or 60 years. We are testing those poles and have tested more than 250,000 to date. We are replacing poles in each deployment area as we go and we are thinking about high availability because there will be penalties if we do not deliver a service that is comparable with that of an urban area.

While today, in parts of the country, storm damage tends to take down telecommunications networks, there are two parts to that. There are the poles that have been there for a significant number of years and there are copper networks. In the latter case, an electrical signal is sent down a copper cable, whereas with fibre it is not. Fibre is much more reliable in terms of technology and the connection boxes. There are no electrical signals in the connection boxes. We use connection boxes that are expected to last for 30 years and beyond. Because of that network refresh, we have calculated the availability of the overall network to be far greater. As we have built those rings to protect what we call an east-west network to each of the connection exchanges, there is a much higher availability than people would traditionally have got with the service they have today, no matter what broadband or voice servers they have.

I will pass to Mr. Malone, who will give a more detailed view of the build and rights of way.

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