Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 June 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

National Broadband Plan Update: National Broadband Ireland

Mr. Peter Hendrick:

If you think about it, there is a centre point and then we go about 20 km out from it. We call that a ribbon. In every deployment area, we have four or five ribbons. We cannot start our main contract work, of installing the cable, until that ribbon is handed back to us by Eir. When it is handed back, it is not just a case of Eir being finished, but it has to send back designs to say what it looks like. We hand those designs to our main contractor so it can build the cable. Eir has increased the capacity of the number of poles it replaces and the number of ducts it repairs. That happened when we wanted to have a five-year programme. The initial phase of Covid, which one could call phase one, then additional spikes and the Omicron variant, all had a further impact. We can see how we could get back to seven years with the capacity Eir has given us. To overachieve that, we believe that self-installation where multiple contractors can repair and work on the subduct themselves, will drive this.

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