Ms Carolan Lennon:

The cost diminishes if there are more cables on a pole. If a service provider has a pole to itself, it costs €20. If there are two service providers on a pole, the cost is €10 each.

The Deputy is quite right in making the point that there is not a pole connecting every house. Many people have gone to mobile and never had a telecoms connection into their house which is not the case for the ESB because every house has electricity.

We raised the point numerous times during the minimum viable product, MVP, process that we should be using all infrastructure to get the best. Why would we put up a pole when there is already a pole in the driveway that brings electricity in? That is a question worth answering. There is other infrastructure and it is not just Eir's infrastructure. We should use whatever infrastructure is available to get the best service to customers and the best price for the State, so I agree.

On whether we need more regulation, it goes back to what I said earlier. We feel that the regulator is focused on the competition side of regulation and not as focused on creating an environment for investment. For example, most of our products, as I said, are regulated based on cost orientation, that is, the cost to maintain or build that product. In most countries when rolling out fibre to the cabinet, cost orientation was introduced seven years afterwards because that is the kind of time that would be needed to roll out these networks and get a return on them. In Ireland we went to cost orientation in four years. When we had started our roll-out we never thought for a second we might be at cost orientation. Again, when rolling out networks, it takes a while to understand what the actual costs are as one sees different set-ups, different connections and so on. We feel we need to look more actively at regulation on the infrastructure side, create that environment for our infrastructure and be less focused on the competition. One need only look at what has happened to market share over the past number of years. This is the point that Gary made earlier about the damage to competitors. It is ALTO's members who have grown their market share over the past number of years, not Eir retail. That is the reality. Sky was relatively new to the market three years ago and it has taken a decent amount of market share. That says to me that on the competitive side it is working. To be in cost orientation, however, four years after spending significant millions on a network feels too soon, and it is potentially a barrier to people investing in the country.

On the separation of wholesale, the committee probably knows the answer to this before I say it. There is one country where there has been forced separation of wholesale and retail, and that is the UK. That does not seem to have worked in terms of fibre penetration, or certainly rural fibre penetration. We say we are sub-scale in Ireland to have a completely separate business. If that is done, the cost of separate IT systems and so on will lead to higher prices because all of those costs will feed into our cost-orientated prices, which will impact on the consumer. The things we are doing, such as separate incentives for the open-air team, separate buildings, green regulatory governance processes, reporting and so forth, are adequate. Right across Europe there is no other example that I know of where wholesale has been successfully separated.