Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

Yes, of course I will. We decided that the best way to explain what NBI is doing and in how it is building this network is to show the committee some maps. Mr. Neary, the resident engineer and chief technology officer in the office, is overseeing the network deployment, will explain that in detail and will set out a number of examples. These examples are representative of every county, and even though we will show just one county it is representative of every one.

At the outset, a couple of key questions that people ask are who decided the places in which the roll-out will happen first, how this works, and are we hitting or cherry-picking areas first so that NBI is getting a better bang for its buck, and so forth? As Mr. Neary will explain, the network roll-out is divided in to 227 deployment areas up and down the country in every county. The architecture of the network design is specifically based on the design of the NBI network coming from the Eircom exchanges or Enet's metropolitan area networks, MANs. As Mr. Neary will show the committee in a moment, it is not quite as simple as an inward-out process. Members will see that there are what we call shape files, which are these polygons that represent a deployment area, each being one of the 227. The blue and yellow deployment areas for Galway and its outskirts represent a deployment area. I will hand over now to Mr. Neary to explain what those polygons mean and how they are arrived at before one designs something.

The most fundamental point in principle in all of this is that NBI, through the contract, is not deciding on what the build is on the basis of cost or on how easy it is to get there. This is based on a network design of getting everywhere as fast as possible but within the confines of how rings are built around certain areas to ensure that the fibre rings are there to provide robustness, reliability and resilience. If, for example, a cable falls over or is broken, all of these networks need to have back-up plans where if one cog in the wheel falls over, 1,000 premises are not then left without broadband. That is how networks work. They are done in rings so that the data can go backwards and forwards to the Internet and one point of failure does not bring down the entire network. Mr. Neary will explain these rings to the committee in terms of fibre build.

When one looks at any one of these deployment areas, there is low and high-hanging fruit. It is non-discriminatory in that regard because there are remote and non-remote premises in every deployment area. The deployment area, for example, in which I live is at the bottom of a mountain in County Wicklow but I am in the same deployment area as Kilcoole and Greystones, which are urban areas. I am five miles from the nearest village but it just so happens that I am within the ring of that fibre network. The homes in my area will be far more expensive to get to than some of the homes in Kilcoole or Greystones and again this depends on particular circumstances, because getting to homes in some urban or semi-urban areas can be quite expensive as it may be all underground or trenching may have to be dug, which will be more expensive than overhead cables that one might bring through rural areas.

The plan is not based on cost or any particular economic model but primarily on an engineering model. Now is a good time for me to stop talking about engineering and to hand over to Mr. Neary.