Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Again, I refer the Deputy to the meeting of the Joint Committee on Transport and Communications with National Broadband Ireland, NBI, yesterday, where some of these issues were discussed, certainly from the point of view of NBI on the acceleration of the rollout. The programme for government states that the Government will attempt to compress the length of time for the rollout from seven years to five years, in other words, to brings years six and seven into years four and five. At the same time, because of the pandemic, we had delays at the start, so we are playing catch-up at one end of the rollout and we are trying to compress at the other end.

What are the efforts we are making? We are engaging with our contractor, NBI, and my Department is trying to come up with a realistic plan that can allow an acceleration of the number of homes that are connected per month.

The number will be roughly 8,000 per month at full rate, up to 16,000 per month in order to reach all 544,000 homes within five years instead of seven years. You can see a parallel between the roll-out of the vaccination programme where you have an initial period of time when you are carrying out surveys, when you are doing initial works or when you are constrained for whatever reason at the start and then you ramp up to a period where you have many teams delivering a lot of equipment based on a lot of initial work being done.

One of the first things that has to be done is that every home in the deployment area has to be surveyed. There are 544,000 premises. Half of them have been surveyed at this stage. That survey work shows nothing. You are not getting your deployment area. What one will see with this roll-out will be an acceleration. In the first year, nobody was connected. In the second year, we began to connect homes in Carrigaline and Cavan, but in future years we will be moving apace.

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