Mr. Peter Hendrick:

The contract requires that we deliver a level of service. The level of service needs to be equivalent to that of the predominant urban product available in the market, including the 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 2 Gbps services available to people living in Dublin or Cork. That is the predominant service we are deploying across the entire network. Everybody is getting that service, whether on the mainland or on an island. We are delivering by deploying fibre on the island, so every home will be connected with fibre. There is an important distinction to be made here. We all understand wireless as a mobile service or as entailing an antenna on a house but there are other forms of wireless services, which we call "microwave transport". This is more of a backhaul transport technology. That technology forms part of our network deployment. In this scenario, we deliver the required capacity and resilience to all the islands. On some of the islands, we are delivering capacity of 40 Gbps from the mainland fibre to the island fibre. Some of it can be short-hop and some can be slightly longer, but we have engineered things to deliver the required capacity to meet today's and future demand for the number of homes, farms and businesses that will connect to the on-island fibre.

I appreciate that people have a perception of what wireless technology entails. We are talking about technology that would not typically be connected to a home. We are talking about microwave transport, which is typically used for mission-critical services, high-bandwidth services.

I will give some examples of where we have deployed this over the last 20 years. We have used this microwave transport infrastructure to support backhaul to the metropolitan area networks and fibre networks. Another example is that we have built a network in the Channel Islands connecting Guernsey, Alderney and Sark. It was with Cable & Wireless but we were brought in to deliver the solution for this network. They had fibre on the islands and they connected the transport network between the Channel Islands. We have used and deployed this in critical services, including the Irish Coast Guard, the Irish Aviation Authority, and the 999 emergency call answering service in Navan. That was connected on fibre and we had microwave transport coming from the metropolitan area in Navan. We supported and managed support for An Garda Síochána's Dublin network over a number of years.

Some of the other examples that we have used with regard to very high-capacity microwave transport include all of the broadcast services out of the Aviva Stadium and Croke Park, and RTÉ studios around the country, including Dingle. We have also provided backhaul services on this transport to ESB and several mobile networks. As a wholesale operator, over the last 20 years we have used this microwave transport infrastructure to support wholesale services to Eir, BT, AT&T, Verizon, Orange, Vodafone, Sprint, NTT Docomo, T-Mobile and many others. It is a very heavily engineered solution with high resiliency, high availability and high capacity. We have used this technology for many years, as have many telecommunications companies, so it is very different in how we connect the capacity from the mainland to the island. We are required under the contract to ensure that island users, homes, businesses and farms get the same speed, latency and availability that is available to those on mainland, and that contract prevails for 25 years. The contract requires that NBI delivers that level of service to the end users.