Mr. Peter Hendrick:

I thank the Senator. I will take the question about people who have to wait a number of years for high-speed fibre broadband. For commercial areas, if somebody today is on a greater than 30 Mbps service, it may be delivered on copper or a coaxial cable and once they are above 30 mbps they are not part of the national broadband plan. Based on the announcements from Eir, Virgin, Siro and others, we do believe that there is an intent for those operators to migrate off of those copper and coaxial cable networks onto fibre. Obviously they have got a roll-out plan and a timeline associated with that but we understand that is their intent.

On the NBP roll-out, the way our network typology works is when we do our survey and design we ascertain where all the homes in a deployment area are and we set a design threshold as to how far we can go. That has to take into account a number of things, namely the broadband speed we are providing today, the broadband speed we need to ensure we can provide over the next 30 to 40 years and then account for new homes that are going to be added in over that period in terms of the utilisation and capacity for those homes. There are a number of areas. It does get technical but it comes down to what we call the propagation loss of the light that travels down the cable. There is a certain limitation which we cannot go beyond. We have to stop somewhere. It might feel that where we stop the network is only 100 m or a kilometre away from somebody else, but members can rest assured that no home will be left behind. It may just be that they have to be served from another deployment area because of those limitations. It is not that we are choosing to take the easier homes or to move homes around. They are literally down to technical challenges. We need to ensure that we can deliver the speed, latency and availability over the contract period, which is 25 years but, equally, to meet the ten-year extension to which we have committed with the Department.