Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

I am pretty sure but I can come back to the Chairman on that. ComReg looked after the all the porting of numbers to mobile and fixed-line services. As I understand it, the landline service is the same as the mobile service. For example, if you were to change from Vodafone to Three, you would keep your number; the same applies for landlines.

What Mr. Neary can confirm is that National Broadband Ireland offers under the contract a voice service as well as a broadband service. Obviously, it has to put in the fibre cable first but once it is in, you can buy a landline service if your retail provider offers it. What I would question in respect of the person who queried that is from whom he or she asked to buy the landline service. The retailer may not have offered that service, but there are now 23 retailers selling over NBI's network and the majority of them offer a landline service and will send customers out their own handsets. National Broadband Ireland does an in-house service not only for Wi-Fi but also for voice. It is all available and will be the equivalent to what people got over copper, although it will be a lot cheaper. With the landline, when you got only a voice service you paid a rental fee of maybe €30 or €40 a month for just the voice service. Now you will pay €30, €40 or €50 a month for broadband and voice, so it will be a much cheaper solution for voice and broadband.

I will take up the point about the communications strategy. It is difficult when you are dealing with 540,000 premises. The issue National Broadband Ireland faced on the communications front was that, with the best will in the world, as Mr. Ó hÓbáin said, 99% or probably more of premises are staying in their deployment areas. You can send them out feet on the street, that is, people to tell them when the service is expected. You can give them leaflets saying a survey is happening there. NBI is very clear that if a survey is happening in your area, you are probably at least 12 months away from getting a fibre broadband connection. NBI can do all that but there are anomalies whereby the infrastructure is not there in that deployment area or it makes sense to move those few premises into the next deployment area. Then, in fairness to the communications people in National Broadband Ireland, they pull their hair out because they have just told Johnny Murphy he will get the service next year but he will now not get it until two years' time. It is a problem, but I think Mr. Ó hÓbáin made the point that you cannot really bring everything down to the lowest common denominator whereby if there is one problem, no one will be communicated with as to when they will get the service. We could have decided last year that nobody should be told anything about when they will get connected. We all agree that that is not the best outcome. There will be 1%, maybe, of people who will be very frustrated, like the examples the Chairman has given us, and that will continue because, unfortunately, the only way to solve that problem is not to tell anybody anything, and that is not a good outcome. I will bring the matter back to NBI and it will work on it. The question is how we fix that anomaly in order to defuse that frustration a small number of people feel while not preventing us from telling the mass market what is happening. It is a problem every utility provider faces. This is done by Eircode postcode. There are 2.3 million of them in the State. It is hard to get every one of them right, and we will just have to work around that.