Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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Personally, I would like to see the State intervention phase happen much more quickly than is the case at the moment. It is important that people understand the context of this, however. To use the analogy of a road, we are trying to bring a motorway to every single home in Ireland. Everyone has two cars outside their home at the moment but, in the future, everyone in each house is going to have two cars and some will even have a bus or two. We are now saying that if people decide in the future to set up a freight business, the road infrastructure will be able to cater for that at any stage over the next 25 years. That is a massive task. This is a contract for 25 years to ensure that the broadband we install now is robust enough to meet requirements and needs over that period. Over the last five years, we have seen a dramatic ramp-up in demand for data, and every single digital network in this country is investing and investing just to stand still.

We are not just trying to bringing a motorway to every single home, however. In the short term, we are also looking at the boreens. We want to cut the hedges, take the grass out of the middle of the road, take the grass verges off the sides and resurface them. We are doing that through the build-out of wireless and mobile technology. Given that we have put a pure fibre backbone into 60 towns across the country and pretty much the vast majority of rural villages in the form of open access networks, we can put hot desks into every community in the country. People in their own, local areas can have access to pure fibre at 1,000 Mbps high-speed broadband, the likes of which is only available in places like Hong Kong and Singapore. Wireless and mobile operators can improve on their existing level of service and expand into rural areas, into the amber areas, into the 542,000 homes and premises that do not have access to broadband and are not part of the current commercial intervention. I am determined to make sure that every single one of those 542,000 homes has access to a broadband services as quickly as possible. We are working with private operators to do that.

On foot of releasing the 3.6 GHz spectrum earlier this year, I have had one operator come to me that is looking at a 5G point-to-point fixed wireless deployment, which is expected to cover 85% of the land mass of this country by 2019. Work is ongoing. My priority at the moment is to address the issues and genuine concerns of the people on those digital boreens who are not getting access to a broadband service or who are getting access only to an inadequate service. My priority is to provide them with a basic service pending the roll-out of the high-speed broadband service. I am satisfied that we are on target to ensure that a minimum of 77% of premises in this country will have access to high-speed broadband by 1 January 2019. By 2020, at least 91% of premises in this country will have access to high-speed broadband. I suspect it will probably be higher than that but I am only committing to 91% until I see the detail roll out.