Mr. Peter Hendrick:

On the Deputy’s first point, we are aware of the importance both of getting this network built and of making sure that it is a reliable service that is at a price point equal to customers living in more urban areas. Therefore, a critical part of our project and the contract is to ensure that it is of equal service to anyone who is in an urban area and has an equivalent fibre-based service.

On the deployment plan and its impact on people who live close to other networks, obviously we are deploying this across all 26 counties and it is difficult to meet all demands at any one time. Hence, we looked at two things. The first was how we approach infill premises. These are premises that are close to what we call the commercial areas. These premises are in urban areas and could be connected to networks today if we had a contract in place with certain operators. That is under way at the moment. We have a pre-qualification framework in place, as I said earlier on. We will put that in place at the end of this year, with pilots early next year. I hope this will resolve the challenges that a number of people face today with broadband.

It has been helpful to have 46 of the retail operators signed up to the NBP programme and connecting to the NBI network. This means we are getting a great adoption of customers, particularly with some of the wireless operators. Some of their customers are transitioning from wireless to fibre. The net impact is that they are freeing up capacity on their own network. This means that retail operators are delivering a better service to customers who may not fall within an area that we cover today but who are just outside it. A number of operators have come back to us and told us the customer experience has been fantastic. This is on foot both of just connecting to our network and the ongoing delivery of 500 Mbps, which has been transformational for people's lives, and because it has freed up a significant level of capacity on the network, particularly for people who are working from home and who utilise a lot of video content. This is a combination of our deployment in every county, the releasing of capacity on legacy networks that probably are finding with Covid-19 the increase in demand of bandwidth has had an impact on the services they deliver and the infill review we are doing with wholesale providers.

In terms of the contract and relief, obviously we have relief for the 2021 plan in respect of what we experienced with Covid-19 and our supply chain. However, it is critical from our perspective, as well as that of the Department, that we put all of the enablers in place including all of the contracts with our suppliers, with Eir and with our subcontractors, to recover from that delay. Certainly, that is our focus from here until the end of 2022 in order that we can start showing the acceleration of the plan towards the end of the project.