Mr. T.J. Malone:

I will take a couple of those. I will let Ms Fisher give the Deputy the good news about Longford in a minute. Outside of the storm, we have a service level agreement, SLA, whereby 85% of any repairs have to be done within two working days. Since the inception of this, we are working at around 90% so we are well above the SLA.

Of the 955 broadband connection points, 672 are schools. We covered every school in the intervention area. To get them up and running because of Covid and everything like that, we initially put in a microwave dish to give them a direct point-to-point connection. As we pass them with fibre on the programme, we swap out that microwave dish and bring fibre in. By the end of this year, we will have close to 500 of those 672 schools switched from the microwave dish to fibre connectivity. Over the next 12 months, we will switch the rest to fibre.

On switching and strengths, NBI is the wholesaler. We wholesale to the 50 broadband sellers. We offer a minimum of 500 Mbps service, uncontested, to everybody. We also offer 1 Gbps, 2 Gbps and 5 Gbps services. It is up to the customer to choose the one they want from the service provider. We can provide up to 10 Gbps at any point. At the moment, we just offer up to 5 Gbps but the network is future-proofed and built to offer, uncontested, up to 10 Gbps to any end user. By changing out a bit of equipment in the house like a modem, we could go up to 25 Gbps. The network we have built is future-proofed for generations to come.