Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to be able to speak on the Bill, and to bring to the attention of the Minister of State some of the issues that are affecting us nationally. First I will deal with the telephone system and the billing situation at the moment. Eir has issued letters to all of its fixed line customers to say that, in future, they will have to pay €7.50 for the privilege of getting their bill sent out in the post. I think that is wrong. Most of the people affected by this issue are those who perhaps do not have access to online services or do not have the competence to use online services to pay their bills, or do not have the broadband or telephone networks required to do the same thing. It is wrong for companies, such as Eir, to introduce a €7.50 charge for the privilege of having bills posted. I spoke to a woman yesterday who said that she is thinking of giving up her landline because she has an old-fashioned mobile phone. The problem is that she is not sure whether she will need the landline to install emergency alarms in her house because she lives alone. She is paying approximately €250 a year for the benefit of having a landline. She checked her bills and she made one call on it in the past two months. There is a corporate responsibility on the likes of Eir to look at this type of situation, and to ensure that they are not just milking innocent people. Adding €7.50 on to the cost of posting a bill is wrong and should be tackled head on by the Department.

When people have broadband installed and get their package from whatever company they get it, they are told that they will enjoy broadband speeds of up to a set number of megabytes. That is a marketing tool. If people go back and check on how many days in a month that they actually reach the target speed, they will find that it is very few. Customers are told that they will enjoy speeds of up to a certain number of megabytes. That is wrong, and has to be stopped, so that customers who are buying something know that they are getting, and are getting what they pay for. That is the important message there.

With regard to the NBP, I am critical of the likes of Eir. It has an installation in place that serves a certain length of a road, for example, but will not serve the next house or whatever. According to Eir, that house is in the intervention area and is out of its service area. There might be five houses left on the road without service. I know that the installation is in a circle on a map, and this is how it ends up. Surely to God, there has to be some joined-up thinking between National Broadband Ireland and Eir to ensure that such houses, which are still low-hanging fruit, can be connected to the system so that customers can get the fibre-optic broadband. In some cases, the service is available and businesses in rural areas cannot access it because they are outside the service area. There might be a line in the road, as it were. That is an archaic way of trying to deal with things, especially in light of the fact that the roll-out of the NBP was delayed and it will continue until 2027.

There is another innovation that the Minister of State might consider. It concerns cases where NBI or Eir are connecting customers and there is a satellite dish at the property. Such dishes should be taken by the local authorities and set up, in extreme rural areas that are going to take four or five years to get to, to be reused. Perhaps the mobile phone and broadband task force could look at this, as something that there could be joined-up thinking on, to ensure that we roll out, even on a temporary basis, satellite signal to places that will not get the fibre-optic broadband for a good while. That is very important.

I was involved in the NBP, as was my colleague. It is the best thing that has happened, but we need to make sure that the roll-out is expedited and that we push it along to get more and more houses done. The frustration I have is that people ask when it is going to be done. It is going to be 2024, 2025 or 2026 before they get their broadband. These are people who could be working or doing a lot of other things from home. At the moment, they are travelling a lot and wasting a lot of carbon.

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