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:

The milestones are broken down into M0s, M1s and M2s. The M0s are largely associated with a lot of the mobilisation activities, onboarding of retail operators, setting up the test lab, getting data centres, and getting all the infrastructure up and running in order to be able to start serving and engaging with the retail operators. They are predominantly the M0 milestones.

The M1s then are the designs after we have done the surveys. We must have done a complete survey of each deployment area. We must also have designed it from a physical network perspective. We must further have built in all of our assumptions around how many trees need to be trimmed, how many poles need to be replaced, and how many kilometres of underground duct needs to be installed. Once the Department has audited that activity, it gives us an approval to proceed, ATP. Effectively, we then issue that ATP to the independent certifier and, including on the M0 milestones, the independent certifier does an audit on all of our achievements to ensure that we have met the achievements.