Mr. T.J. Malone:

To give some background on the sequence, as Mr. Hendrick said earlier, we have 47 different service providers that have signed up for us, which is a huge number of service providers. We are acting as a wholesale provider. We are not a retail service provider. We basically build the motorway and they come on it. We hand over our traffic at a point where we can meet all of the different bodies.

We have two different data warehouses located in Dublin where all the different service providers come into. At that point in time there is a single point where we can hand over all the traffic that comes back off the network. From there, we buy dark fibre that is already in place and which goes all the way out to what we call the regional exchanges. They are the first ones that are in place to get up and running. They serve as the core focal point of the first deployment areas. There are 33 of them all around the country. They are the first ones we need in order to get the speed into getting the roll-out commenced in the early stages. From there we then build out. It must be contiguous, so you go from one to the next and so on. If you build a particular deployment area that is not in sequence and it falls out of sequence and does not have a connectivity back to the previous one then you just do not have light. Light does not travel to it and you end up with what we call a stranded asset, or a set of houses are built, that look great and all the network is in place but we cannot actually provide any service to them. That is the nature of why we must build out in the sequence we are doing. As I said earlier, you could potentially go into a county and build all of the county out faster in a contiguous way and go clockwise and anticlockwise doing that, but we are trying to bring all 26 counties together across the entire country. That is the reason. I gave an analogy the last time around that it was like having a Christmas tree with the light at the top but if you cannot plug it into the socket at the bottom then you cannot get light to it. That is basically it. You have to work in a pattern the whole way up. Included in all that, we must build in resilience. Our operating service level agreement, SLA, here is that we are in operation 99.95% of the time. If for any reason there is a break in the network we must be able to minimise the disruption, minimise the number of houses affected and reverse the path back to the other areas. We are constantly building backhaul and contingency into the plan. That is the sequencing and that is why we are going through with it.

If we go back to County Clare itself, we probably have somewhere in the region of just over 10,000 premises surveyed in the county at the moment. The first of those premises will be coming live in October, November and December. They will be fed out of the Limerick deployment area. We will have somewhere in the region of 1,640 premises that will go live within the coming weeks and months in County Clare. The ones that follow on from that are a few premises coming in from Gort, and then Kilkishen is the first main one located in County Clare itself, followed by Corrofin. By the end of 2023 we are looking at somewhere in the region of 5,500 premises up and running, with Corrofin coming in just after that as well.