Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

We are constantly working on what are called demand stimulation plans and determining what the best means of communicating the service are, for example, feet on the street, sending a van up a road to every house, door drops, local publicity in local newspapers, etc. All of these activities are under way in order to ensure that there is not a lack of awareness, but it still happens in a small number of cases, which means that people do not get connected until much later when they suddenly realise that they can get fibre. I was speaking on a pitch with a farmer in my local area where fibre had been available for three months. I told him that he could get fibre the next day if he wanted to. He had it the following week, but he had not known. There had been three or four door drops to his house. For whatever reason, people sometimes just do not realise it is available.

As Mr. Griffin mentioned, people might be signed up for two-year contracts with Imagine, Eircom or another provider and have to wait until next year to get out of those contracts. If they move early, they will have to pay twice - once to NBI and once to the other operator. This causes a lag in getting from 30% to 60%, but there is an optimistic scenario of at least 80% to 85% of people in the areas in question being connected by 2026 or 2027. It is incremental. According to NBI, 25,000 will be connected by December. It expects at least another 25,000 connections by the end of next year. It is connecting 2,000 per month at the moment. That will soon increase to 3,000 per month. The connections are going well and the connection process for the end user is also going well. There have been no complaints about engineers doing a bad job, not arriving, walking away or anything like that. Someone gets an appointment and has 500 Mbps on the day the connection is made.