Ms Carolan Lennon:

Absolutely. The reality is that if it was not tough luck, I would have been building a 400,000 network. I would have been over my €250 million budget, and I would be delayed. Every day I get requests from people to extend it a bit but the problem is that if I extend it for one, I have to extend it for the other. In reality, we did extend it because in the end we will do 340,000 homes, but that is the reason.

The next question was on the connections. The connection charge is charged to the operator. We charge the operator €170. The operators then decide if they will pass on that connection charge to the consumer. Some operators, as part of their propositions, have a free connection. Others pass on some of the charge. Our connection charge to the operator is €170 and our understanding is that the National Broadband Ireland, NBI, connection charge to the operator is €100.

On the licence, we do not need a licence. If we decided tomorrow that we wanted to do another 100,000 connections, we need licences to open roads and for other issues. Instead of going back into urban and suburban, we decided that if we wanted to go further into rural, we could make that decision and do it.