Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 12 November 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport

Communications Regulation and Network Resilience: Discussion

2:00 am

Mr. Patrick Neary:

That is an interesting question. What is happening in Ireland is quite unique. In 2014 the Government decided to take a long-term view of the infrastructure that was to be deployed through the intervention. The decision was made in Ireland to look at the most remote, rural and difficult-to-reach premises and bring to them a state-of-the-art long-term infrastructure product, which is now being deployed by NBI. We have taken the most difficult and addressed them in the first instance. That standard is better than anywhere else in the country. The commercial operators are driving services that give them a return on investment. In the main, it reaches a similar standard and is benchmarked very similarly.