Ms Katherine Licken:

The ambition of the plan is that everybody, including future generations, will have access to high-speed broadband - broadband that is scalable and meets demands - in order that we are not sitting here in another six or seven years talking about the challenge of broadband.

The fifth slide deals with the commercial developments to which I have alluded. There is a typo in the slide: "€2.5 million investment" should read "€2.5 billion investment" by commercial operators. The Minister has said on numerous occasions that we collectively believe this to be a strong vote of confidence in the Irish consumer and Irish business by the telecommunications sector at a time of particular economic challenge in Ireland. We spoke about the investment by Eircom, which has increased its commitment from one million to 1.6 million premises by mid-2016. It passed its millionth premises in September. We were in Cahersiveen to mark that event.

Eircom is reaching parts of rural Ireland that hitherto had very poor quality broadband and are now getting speeds of up to 100 Mb. Eircom is telling us its roll-out is benchmarked as one of the fastest in Europe and that it is one of the first to use vectoring technology, which allows it to move from 70 Mb as a top speed to 100 Mb as a top speed. That is making a big impact, and we saw this in black and white in Cahersiveen in September. UPC has also made great strides. It was talking in 2012 about more than 700,000 homes having access to speeds of up to 100 Mbps. That figure is now in or around 730,000 homes which have speeds of up to 200 Mbps, so UPC's speeds are between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps and it has launched a business package of 500 Mbps. ESB and Vodafone, as has been alluded to by ComReg, are planning a €450 million investment in fibre to the building, FTTB, with speeds of anywhere between 200 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps. In phase one, 500,000 premises will be addressed in every county.

The spectrum auction is resulting in the roll-out of 4G networks. One operator told us that, as of yesterday, it has 75% coverage of 4G. 4G offers speeds that are roughly ten times greater than what is available on 3G. That it is a noticeable change and it will represent quite a considerable change for people living in rural areas in particular, although it has not reached all rural areas. Vodafone told us that in the roll-out of 4G, what will take it three years in respect of 4G took it 12 years in respect of 3G. One can see the pace of development has changed very considerably, which is a very welcome development. Enet, which operates the metropolitan area networks on behalf of the Department, has announced projects of fibre to the home in four regional towns.

Wireless operators, who operate throughout Ireland, especially in rural Ireland, are making an impact as well in terms of delivering services in areas where other services are not necessarily providing the product consumers want.

We referred to Kerry. The Telecommunications Industry Federation visited Kerry last month to meet local representatives and talk about the issues of broadband coverage in Kerry. I suspect it probably could do a similar presentation in every county in Ireland and it probably would be very welcome if the committee was to invite the industry to appear before it to talk about the levels of coverage and the issues it has spoken about.