Mr. Rory Fitzpatrick:

This is an interesting area. It is an area in which I was involved 20 years ago, as was Digiweb. If you look at the sector across the board, the big problem is ribbon development. We have never got away from it. It is a structural problem built into the society that makes it very expensive to get a fibre or any service to the person who lives on a headland such as Galley Head or wherever. Because of the way we have operated our planning and how we have allowed people to build, we cannot get away from that.

On the wireless side and services, as Mr. Campbell stated , Digiweb is already delivering this into the market. It is one of the better telecoms companies in Ireland doing that. The problem is that there is always a small group on the edge of the network that you cannot deal with. That is just to expensive. Earlier, I mentioned the Starlink system. This is a game changer. I had a Starlink system installed in my house in January. I live in a weird place in that I am located between all of the exchanges in the south of Cork city. I live just outside the city boundary in Carrigaline, but my house lies between Douglas, Carrigaline and Passage and each exchange is too far away from me to get broadband. As a result, I have had huge issues with broadband. I live close to the city in a blue area. I bought the Starlink system in January. I took it out of the box, connected it and switched it on. I am getting speeds of between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps. The big deal about the Starlink system is the latency. It is a game changer. It will be available once the licence is secured. The product is available and it works. It is not 100% at the moment because only 1% of the fleet is up. Approximately 1,600 of the potential 12,000 satellites are up. The latency issue that has been the bane of satellite forever and made it a problem for end users and consumers is gone. I am getting 26 ms latency. Mr. Campbell and his colleagues will know that the real sweet area of satellite is in television because it can beam out to tons of people. In the longer term, I suspect that we will end up with a layered network whereby local wireless, fibre and satellite will integrate into a single platform which the consumer will purchase from whoever provides it.