Mr. Tim Gaston:

I do not have the exact numbers with regard to the poles. I will come back to Senator Wall with them. From memory, it is something in the order of 12,000 to 15,000. It depends on poles used by multiple operators in cities. This year we hope to put in the order of 1,000 new poles into the ground with the sockets and carousels that I mentioned. These are the numbers off the top of my head and I will come back to Senator Wall with exact numbers.

The reason we need to speed this up is because if they go in at a rate of 1,000 a year and there 12,000 it would take 12 years. Clearly that will not work. We need to get better at it. We are putting together a programme to do the design work that needs to be done to ensure it is safe. Often there is not a pole on just one side of the road and there is also one on the other side of the road. Then we have the issue of whether people will cross the road and whether we are creating a hazard. Would it be worse if we did not put in poles? There is a big debate to be had.

We are trying to bring together design of the infrastructure and its provision and make it a more streamlined process. There is also approval and we are in detailed discussions with the local authorities about this. It will take a bit of time. We have funding for it. Earlier, Mr. Kerry touched on resources. We are finding it difficult to get the engineers and, in some cases, the construction resources to carry out this work. We ran some tenders recently and had a very limited response to them because there is so much other construction activity going on in the country. There is bit of competition going on to get the right resources. Certainly there is a strong desire in the NTA to increase the rate of rolling out new poles and, very often, replacing existing poles because some of them are what I will call time expired.