Ms Tara Collins:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. We update our website every two weeks. As a wholesaler, we notify our retail service providers at the beginning of the month and in the middle of the month regarding premises that are available for connection.

In terms of the timelines that the Deputy is seeing on the website, there are two sections on the website. The first is the section that we set up in the past few years specifically for political representatives at nbi.ie/reps, and that will give a breakdown by county in terms of where the Deputy’s constituents are expecting to avail of broadband. The way we have it at the moment, it is for 18 months rolling and he will see a three-month window. For 2023 and 2024, the rolling window will be three months. After that, we have 2025 broken down into H1 and H2, and for 2026, which is the last year at the moment, the premises will display as 2026.

We are encouraging end-users, through political representatives encouraging their constituents, to sign up for expressions of interest. If they put their email address into our website, we will be able to give them regular updates via our email channel and email communications. The Deputy will be able to see a county-by-county breakdown but each individual eircode user can see what is relevant to their specific eircode in getting access to broadband.

We are also doing a huge amount of stakeholder engagement through town halls, the tag with the Department of Rural and Community Development and communicating through our broadband officers and directly into the community. In fact, members of my team are in the WhatsApp groups for all of the islands. There is ongoing communication. Next week, we will be on Cape Clear and Sherkin Island and we will be going to Bere Island after that. We welcome as much engagement as possible from constituents, residents and members of the islands federation, who have been fantastic in supporting and helping us to get the word out.

The main request that I have is to please ask people to sign up for registration for GDPR purposes so we can communicate directly with the end user. The best way that we can do it is if they sign up with our website.