Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

The national broadband scheme is designed exactly to cover rural areas. We are currently tendering and the winning company will cover areas which are not currently covered. That is the purpose of the scheme and it is exactly what it is designed to do.

Going back to what Deputy Coveney stated, the provision of broadband completely across the country is a first step, not the conclusion. We must then leap forward and get next generation broadband, which is faster and has new characteristics. For example, there will be movement from one network to another, as a person may well be on a mobile network connecting to a fixed-line network.

In that context, the development of MANs has been very useful. It was an important investment in 2003, when 3,000 people were connected to broadband, to push the existing operators into the market to start delivering products. Eircom and the main cable companies, in particular, were not doing this.

The market will not deliver everything, but the experience internationally in those countries which are most successful is that competition between the likes of a cable company and a mainline provider delivers the quickest and cheapest products. Pushing the companies to compete with each other is a very good public policy to benefit the public approach. There are instances where it does not deliver and with such cases, we intervene with projects like the national broadband scheme. There will be others.

I will give an example that may make use of MANs in a very effective way. CMOD, the State body with responsibility for procurement of public service development, is engaging with every Department and State agency and telling them to use a number of different service providers when contracting for telecommunications and broadband services. This helps to generate the business case, particularly in smaller rural Irish towns so the services can be delivered to other businesses as well. The State is providing a lead by its own procurement policy to make the business case for people to connect to towns and MANs that might not otherwise be connected.

In the long run, MANs will be a good investment because we will need quality fibre optics. They provide this. I want to see all operators, including Eircom, using them in a very effective way to deliver new services.

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