Mr. Declan Campbell:

I thank the Chairman. There are satellite broadband services available today but we are focusing on the fact that in a very short period, around the next 12 months, satellite technology is going to take a step forward. The speeds that are going to be available to the end users are going to be greater than those available today. I will give the Chairman two answers, namely, what is available today and what will be available in approximately 12 months' time. If I recall correctly, he asked what sort of speeds are available now. Satellite technology today will offer the end user speeds of about 50 Mbps. The time it takes to deploy that is the time required for an installation engineer to go out and fix a satellite dish on the side of somebody's premises. Typically, the operation takes about two hours to complete.

On the cost, today we have satellite services available for less than €100 for installation and the monthly fee is probably €45 or €50. Thus, it is relatively comparable to a low-end DSL service you would get in terms of price and probably trumps it where speed is concerned. However, there is an issue with those satellite services. If the end user wants to visit,rte.ie, for example, the signal goes from the dish on the side of his or her premises, up to the satellite in orbit and back down to Mr. Fitzpatrick's teleport or ground station. It receives that signal as rte.ie, it sends it back up to the satellite and back down to the customer's premises. Naturally, that takes a little bit too long for certain applications. That said, people can watch movies, browse the Internet, use YouTube, and so on with the technologies available today.

The technologies which should be available in the next 12 months are going to take a step forward from there. These are classed as geostationary satellites. They will still have the same latency issue but the speeds will increase. Customers will now be able to use up to 100 Mbps. It will still take a couple of hours to deploy the dish on a customer's premises. The costs will be reasonably similar. We are talking about a set-up fee of probably less than €200 and a monthly fee of approximately €50. Those services will not compare favourably with fibre broadband to the home as is being rolled out by the national broadband plan. That is the gold standard. However, these services will compare with services available to these premises at the moment, be that a mobile solution or a DSL-type solution that is a copper service to the customer's home. In addition-----