Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 7 July 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

Broadband Infrastructure: Discussion

Mr. Hugo Carvalho:

I touched lightly on the issue of quality in my first intervention. Today we have something between 30 Mbps and 40 Mpbs for download and 30 Mbps for upload. If we look into the future and 5G, we will be looking at 250 Mbps. That is what we actually achieve in the Netherlands. That is not a manufactured number, it is from real tests by system integrators, that is, a person installing an antenna and a router. It is 250 Mpbs for download and 100 Mpbs for upload. If the Chairman is asking whether the technology is there to do much more than that, the answer is "Yes", but it will be in cities where higher frequencies are used and where more data can be passed as a result of the way radio frequencies work.

I hope I have addressed the first question on quality.

In terms of time to deploy, I do not live in Ireland but I have visited it approximately three times. If I am to believe that 99% of the population is served with 4G, the time to deploy infrastructure is zero hours and the time to deploy customer-premises equipment rather than antenna is a couple of hours. A 4G router typically has a small antenna. If you wish to continue with those, it is 15 minutes. If you do not wish to keep these, you would need to run a coaxial cable to the rooftop and put up a little antenna, which should be about the size of my hand - my hand measures 25 cm from finger to finger - which is fairly small.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.