Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

I wish to comment on the Finland issue. We recently had a meeting with the Leader group from Kilkenny which had visited Finland and it gave us a lot of background information on what Finland had done. Finland is predominantly community driven. It is a place where communities come together and stump up a lot of money. Local businesses and local people there want 100 to 200 megabytes, MB, and are willing to pay for it. We are saying here that we do not have the microcosm of Finland which has individual communities that put up their hands and said "we are willing to build and fund networks".

We do not have that in Ireland yet. I hope we will have it next year when we say to people that we are willing to fund a certain part of it. Then, hopefully, the commercial industry and maybe certain communities will be willing to fund certain parts of the network we want to build. This is all part of the strategy that we need to come up with next week to maximise the use of existing infrastructure, to maximise the network that is built and also to reduce the cost to the State, because this will cost hundreds of millions. To actually build it will cost much more, but the cost to the State will be hundreds of millions of euro because we expect the commercial sector, and maybe even local communities, to come forward with capital to build this network.

I can assure the Deputy that there will be no duplication of infrastructure. We are required under state aid guidelines to avoid this, but it is also a logical step that in rural Ireland where existing infrastructure can be used - for example, a pole or a duct - we would put fibre cabling on or through it. That is exactly what we will do; we will not allow a company to come in and say it will build all the poles on the other side of the road and put a cable on them. That will not happen. These are all the challenges that we have as part of the programme, but we know exactly what we have to do.

We will only mention a minimum of 30 megabits per second, with many of the premises in rural Ireland getting much more than that. We cannot and will not say it is fibre-to-the-home, because the technical solution is not up to us. The technical solution will be up to the companies that build it, with the proviso that it will be monitored every quarter and every year for the duration of the contract, which could be 15 or 20 years. The companies will be monitored every quarter by the Department or the body that governs the contract to see whether they are meeting these targets. As with issues of mobile phone coverage or other coverage where people promise up to 30 or 50 Mbps, within our programme, if the State is going to intervene here with money, there will be none of this "up to" this, that and the other. It will be a nailed-up contract, with the company monitored every quarter to ensure it is delivering the service we are paying for - whether it is outside Cahersiveen, in Meath or in Wicklow - because the State is paying the money.

At the moment, with commercial operators, it is their money; we cannot say to them what they must deliver. With mobile network operator licences one can to a point, but the mobile operators actually surpass this standard. Within Eircom's footprint of fixed broadband we do not tell them they must offer 30 or 50 Mbps; it is a commercial investment. If Eircom goes to Cahersiveen and offers 50 or 70 Mbps, we are just saying that is a welcome investment and we want them to push that investment as far as they can, so that the State does the rest.