Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will try to explore with the Taoiseach solutions to the broadband crisis that has existed for years throughout rural Ireland and in particular in my constituency of Cork South-West. High-speed fibre broadband is a dream for everyone in rural Ireland, which has turned into a nightmare. It has turned out to be a shameful legacy of Taoiseach after Taoiseach in this country. The current Taoiseach has two and a half years to turn this around. His leadership of the country will be measured in rural Ireland by many issues in this term but broadband will be top in most people's minds.

The €3 billion national broadband plan, NBP, was signed last year. Many doubt if it will work, but that is something I have no wish to dwell on too much today. What I want to dwell on is a solution. We have it under our fingertips. For once, it may not be Eir, Vodafone, Three Ireland or any of the national operators. The solution to almost 100% of our problems is our local private wireless operators. I will offer an example that, if worked on, can be a solution. The Taoiseach could oversee this solution to the broadband problems in this country in his term in office. One of these companies is DigitalForge, a fixed wireless broadband provider in west Cork. It has been providing a service for 16 years and employs eight people. It has provided a service in this time to thousands of homes and businesses in the county of Cork as well as to 60 schools. This business has expanded without any State assistance whatsoever during that time. The company has not increased the price of its standard package, which provides a 70 MB service, in 16 years. The European minimum specification has been 30 MB. We should remember the company started out 16 years ago offering a 1 MB service. It has grown and continues to grow. The company's network is resilient. In the recent Storm Ophelia the longest outage some customers experienced was three hours while customers relying on the traditional hardwired system waited weeks for phone and broadband lines to be restored.

The State sets the price for radio frequencies and by pricing these high, there is no allowance for competition, the recent closure of a Cork wireless operator, permaNET, being an example. The licence goes to the highest bidder. The State does not allocate the spectrum for smaller operators. Prices are in the millions and smaller operators do not stand a chance.

DigitalForge provided broadband to the Mealagh Valley north of Bantry when no other broadband provider could or would help. It provided broadband to Baltimore and when eir came to town later to rich pick customers, almost all of DigitalForge's customers stayed with it because, as they said, they had a top-class service and somebody at the end of the phone who would immediately set about resolving any problems.

The areas I have spoken of have benefited from having DigitalForge in west Cork. Gaggan in Bandon, Kilmacsimon in Innishannon, Sandycove in Kinsale and other areas of west Cork have little or no broadband. Despite of all of the efforts to get the larger operators to deliver extra capacity, nothing has been delivered.

Will the Taoiseach sit down with the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment and try to create a level playing pitch by developing a two-tier solution? I do not mean in any way to disrupt the national broadband dream, which can work away behind the scenes. Rather, I ask that private wireless operators be given some small State assistance and recognition for being the only operators who can deliver broadband to well over 90% of rural Ireland. In some cases, they provided 100% of the broadband to areas of rural Ireland for the first time.

See this speech in context