Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

MANs were funded by the Government through local authorities many years ago, approximately in 2002. They are managed by a company called Enet and they have been built. To answer some of the Senator's questions, and it is part of the Enet solution, one of the tenets of the contract negotiating process of recent years, which is inbuilt in the contract, is the requirement to reuse existing infrastructure. We are not duplicating, overlaying or redigging roads where we should not. Eir, which owns the national pole and duct network and has exchanges throughout the country, and Enet, which manages the MANs in many towns throughout the country, have, therefore, built infrastructure. National Broadband Ireland is under contract using them as partners, which we call subcontractors, and it has these contracts in place since last November. It was part of the contract with the Government that it had to have them in place. It has a 25-year agreement with Eir and Enet to use all of these.

The basic infrastructure is in place in terms of poles and ducts. NBI's job is, with Eircom, to replace bad or old poles that have been there 40 or 50 years throughout rural Ireland and fix broken ducts. Then NBI will get contractors to put in new fibre because the fibre does not exist. This is the new piece. The new piece of the jigsaw is the fibre cable. The exchanges all exist so they are not being rebuilt. The only new piece of this jigsaw is new equipment that comes from Nokia. Nokia is deploying its boxes of equipment throughout the country because that is what lights the fibre. The fibre cable does nothing on its own. It requires a box on either end of it, in the home and at the exchange, to make the 500 Mb work. If people want to go to 1 Gb things in the boxes are switched and it goes to 1 Gb.

The primary context here is that the money from the State is going on the pieces of the jigsaw that are not already there. NBI rents the pieces of the jigsaw that are already there from Enet and Eir. The analogy is that the house is built and we are doing up the house and renting it. That is exactly what we are doing here. We are making sure the house stands up for the next 25, 40 or 50 years. NBI has an obligation to upgrade the house and maintain it and make sure it is working. This is the contract.

The relation between the State and National Broadband Ireland is that NBI is a commercial company and we have a contract with the State for 25 years. Mr. Neary and I, together with a large team in the Department, oversee the contract. We make sure NBI sticks to the contract it signed last November. We can vary the contract through change controls and all that good stuff. Where it becomes difficult is if those changes we want it to engage in cost more money than it envisaged at the time of the contract. That is where we would get into a difficult conversation. There are many things we can ask it to do that do not cost more money. We have already made changes, for example, the acceleration of the schools project was a change we made and it will go ahead. These negotiations go on all the time.

The Senator asked how many people do not have broadband at present. The short answer is that everybody in Ireland, bar a very small percentage, has basic broadband.