Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 10 February 2022

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 29 - Environment, Climate and Communications
National Broadband Plan Expenditure and Related Matters

9:30 am

Mr. Peter Hendrick:

Under the national broadband plan, nobody will be left behind. For anybody who does not have access to 30 Mbps today that will be addressed under the national broadband plan. While that commitment was made, probably, ahead of most other European member nations, Europe is following suit. The intent is to deliver future-proofed infrastructure across Europe. If somebody has 30 Mbps or between 30 Mbps and 100 Mbps, he or she is obviously on a commercial operator's network, whether Eir, SIRO or another provider. I would expect - we are seeing this in terms of the announcements that are being made by commercial operators - that there will be a transition to future-proof networks, those being fibre. Over the past six months, there have been a number of announcements by SIRO and Eir in terms of their continued roll-out of fibre networks. The expectation is that by 2026, over 95% of homes will be connected on fibre-based networks.