Mr. Ronan Lupton:

I thank the committee for inviting us to update it and to present evidence on the state of the market. The theme of broadband installation affects consumers in their homes but also the key area of all our businesses. ALTO is a trade association which has been operating since 1999, so we are 19 years in the fight to get quality broadband and services to consumers, while making sure that the regulatory and Government environment and the market conditions are in the correct position to facilitate services and ensure proper competition at all levels of the market. For today's purposes, we produced a long statement which the committee will have seen at this point. If it is appropriate, the statement can be taken as read. As the Chairman indicated in terms of time slots, we intend to split the presentation. Mr. O'Brien will deal with market and strategic issues and Mr. Barrins will deal with the second element, namely, regulation. The third issue is regulatory governance and the regulatory governance model, which is a voluntary scheme that was undertaken by Eircom and which resulted in significant disclosures of issues in the market. Mr. O'Dwyer will deal with that. I will briefly deal with the status of Eircom at this point. With the Chairman's permission, I will not take my full five minutes now but, at the end of the presentations, I will give conclusions so we have a proper flow to the evidence in the presentation.

ALTO has ten members, so it is a significant voice in the Irish market. Our members are BT Ireland, Sky Ireland; Colt Telecom, Magnet Networks, Siro, 3 Ireland, ESB Telecoms, Virgin Media, Verizon and Vodafone. As members can see, that is pretty much everybody in the marketplace apart from Eir and, possibly, Enet. It is a significant grouping. We operate strictly under the competition law obligations imposed on us and we are also registered with the Standards in Public Office Commission, SIPO, for lobbying purposes.

Moving to the issue of Eir and its status, members will be very aware of the privatisation and public flotation of Eircom in 1998 and the various iterations of ownership which have taken effect. What we have seen is a situation where we must rely on elements of the Eir network to be healthy and to perform and for it to comply with regulatory governance and regulation in the main. What we see is that such compliance is not what we would like it to be. We now have a new ownership structure, but what we say in our statement is plus ça change. There is now a French body of investors involved in the company. We have not really seen anything concrete in terms of proper management and governance. A message we would like to give to the committee is that, with the new board that has been installed, a number of high-profile and experienced telecoms executives are now in there and we would like to see them put regulatory governance and compliance with the regulation to the forefront of their minds, as the previous board within Eir did, which has only been let go in recent times. That is where we are in respect of our views with regard to the Eir position. We do not want to be too critical because what the regulatory governance model, RGM, piece of this presentation does is disclose certain other issues so we will get to that in due course.

That is all I will say at the moment until such time as I get to my concluding remarks which, hopefully, will follow nicely. I will hand over to Mr. O'Brien. I hope I have not killed my full five minutes with that summary.