Mr. Patrick Neary:

I will introduce a couple of terms to explain the NBI roll-out. As can be seen from the screen, there are blue and light green polygons. Each one of these is a deployment area and is akin to an exchange area. In the centre of that area is the electronic equipment that all of the fibre feeds back to so that it all connects to the Internet in due course. The electronic equipment is based, typically, in a town or a village and is in an exchange building or it can be a cabinet. These are referred to in this map as optical line terminals, OLTs. A deployment area, therefore, is a group of premises, typically around a 25 km radius, where the electronic equipment resides to which the fibre feeds back to.

There are 227 deployment areas covering the whole country. Every area within the intervention area in Ireland is covered by one of these deployment areas. There are 33 very important deployment areas, which are more important than the others from an engineering perspective. These are coloured on this map in light green and yellow. These are the points of handover where another operator can put their own equipment alongside that of NBI and access the network.

Another important part of the hand over of the deployment area is for them to connect back to the main data centres in Dublin that then connect to the international Internet and all the content providers. There are 33 of those in Ireland and the first step is to deploy them. Without those in place, the other deployment areas have no connectivity to anything. They do not connect to the Internet until those 33 areas are in place. The roll-out strategy is to get the 33 areas in place as quickly as possible and then start building the deployment areas alongside them so they can then connect to the deployment area, which is coloured light green on the map, and back to the Internet through Dublin.

The next slide shows a map of Galway. I am more familiar with County Mayo so Claremorris, for example, is a point of handover location because it has a MAN, which is already connected back to Dublin thus one is reusing an existing structure. If the NBI places the initial electronic equipment in Claremorris, it can just rent infrastructure back to Dublin, so there is no need to build new infrastructure, and that is already a connection to the Internet, etc. Claremorris is a good example. Once the NBI provides its own electronic equipment then anything connected to Claremorris can be connected to the Internet. The strategy is to connect all of the premises within the Claremorris deployment area. So that is the first town in that area that will be deployed. Next is a move to the area beside Claremorris. In this scenario that means Ballinrobe or Cloonfad. The reason for doing so is once the NBI deploys its electronic equipment in Ballinrobe, it will be connected to Claremorris, which then goes back to Dublin. If one were to start in Ballinrobe, the area would not be connected to the Internet. Ballinrobe would just be an island and would have no connectivity to the Internet unless one starts building back to Dublin. The quickest way back to Dublin, and in truth to the international Internet, is from Ballinrobe to Claremorris and then back to Dublin.

Let us consider the scenario. One has deployed the Claremorris deployment area so that is now live. One moves on to Ballinrobe and builds out all of the premises surrounding Ballinrobe so within a 25 km radius of the town, which encompasses every secondary and primary road, and boreens. So every premises that is in an intervention area will be covered and that is then brought back to Claremorris. The dark line that we put on the map represents the connectivity between Ballinrobe and Claremorris. That connectivity is the backhaul between Ballinrobe and Claremorris. What happens to Claremorris is that all of the surrounding deployment areas are built out in a ring, so there is Ballinrobe, Maum, Liscarney, Castlebar and Cloonfad. That is really the progress of the deployment. One will consistently see it built out in a ring and one will see the same in Galway.

As Mr. Mulligan mentioned earlier, if there is a break in the backhaul at some point in the ring then one has two options. Let us say the connectivity between Maum and Claremorris is broken somewhere in Ballinrobe. The connectivity can go the opposite way on the ring. The design is clever as it gives resilience and allows the NBI to ensure that the actual service will be very positive for consumers once the NBI gets the ring in place. There has been a lot of commentary as to why one would not start out, for example, in Liscarney, which is near Westport, and come back. Until one gets connectivity back to the global Internet then that would be an island on its own. It is important that the green areas are done first and then everything else will feed from those points of handover.

I wish to point out that every premises in each area is covered in a fully coherent way as the build is done. It is not that the main ones are done before moving on. Each of the deployment areas can be seen on the NBI website. There is a cascade of these happening in parallel. For example, there are 3,500 premises in the Galway point of handover that is marked in a light green colour on the slide shown. In the surrounding areas surveys and the deployment of structures will be commenced very quickly once the Galway one is in situ.