Mr. Peter Hendrick:

Perhaps, I will just answer that question first on the order from May to August. What happens is that 90 days before we release a deployment area for order, we allow a preorder window. All of our communications are around the preorder window and we set the live date. We will look into whether it is not being communicated to the end user. Certainly, when we communicate that there is a preorder window, the live date will not be until, for example, August. We set those dates and we communicate regularly and equally with the retail operators on that. We will check, look into that and come back to the committee on that.

On the communications from the connections contractor, we have worked with our contractor in detail about how their engineers are brought on board, how they are trained, what they say and how they manage that communication. It is something that we continuously manage with them and something we will take up with them. They should not be redirecting end users back to county councillors.

On KPIs, we have performance metrics that we aim to achieve and ultimately we have to achieve under the contract. One of them is to achieve 80% of connections within ten working days. As we ramped up, we were struggling to hit that 80% threshold within ten working days and we were certainly longer than that. Right now, we are at or about the 80% threshold within ten working days. Critical to that is the survey work we do upfront in understanding what type of connections they are. We are never going to capture every single scenario of what may go wrong with connections. There are always going to be issues. Typically, as the committee will understand, we have 165 crews with our connections contractor who are connecting homes single day and they ultimately do multiple connections. There are also associated plant and machinery with those crews, what we call civil crews, who are digging up roads. At times we have 25 or 26 of those digging and repairing infrastructure. We also have poling crews who are replacing and installing new poles. From a cost and efficiency perspective, we want to ensure that those resources are deployed on the right types of installs at the right time and that is really the purpose and design activity was upfront. We have teams who will move when needed to support some of the challenges in the network but there are always going to be scenarios where one has more than one problem with the connection.

We are trying to be very efficient in working with KN Network Services (IRE) Limited at the moment is that KN does not find one problem and leave site and send a team back to fix that one problem. When the teams to finish the cable come back again, they can find another problem. We are trying to see if we can ensure that if they find any problem that is going to happen on the install, whether that is on the side of the road or on the homeowner's land, they are looking at a full solution. Sometimes the installing engineer is not the engineer who is considering what is needed here and are they actually looking at the survey with regard to having four blockages where they need a road opening licence, traffic management, to stand a pole or to talk to the landowner about the new surface of their driveway or their grass verge. In scenarios like that we deploy surveyors to re-evaluate and redesign as opposed to engineers being back and forth with multiple problems. We believe that we are getting better, we believe that KN is improving and we believe that we will see greater improvement on this as we go forward.