Dr. Ian McCabe:

My personal position is that fibre end to end would be the better solution. We can tell the committee only what the needs of right now are. As the Internet of things and sensorised technology increase, the amount of bandwidth needed will dramatically increase. We are working with the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, OGCIO, to trial a private 5G network on Clare Island that we hope to use for the health project. We hope that that will be in place in the near future to allow us to continue the roll-out of our health initiative. In the meantime, however, we do not really have anything so we are using private Internet and Starlink and other things like that just to try to come up with solutions for the minute. It is not a proper solution that we can roll out to other places.