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

I will respond first to Deputy McNamara. He suggested that we should know which are the critical components that need to be excluded because they are dangerous and should not be in the network. I want to clarify this point and give the Deputy an explanatory memorandum. A number of things are happening here. The first is the designation of critical components. These are parts of the network which are critical to its function. They are not vendor-specific. We might say, for example, that a wireless tower is a critical component or that the cable that connects the wireless tower to another base station is a critical component. We would not want to remove those items from the network. There is then another part of the legislation which refers to security measures that we might take. There are two kinds of listing going on.

One is listing the vulnerable or risky parts of the network. The second part is saying the security measures we want to take. The security measure taken does not have to be the banning of a particular vendor and all its equipment from all areas of the communication network. It is much more likely that equipment from a particular vendor used in a particular way should not be used in a particular component of the network. It is a much narrower thing. It can be something for the future. It can be that when replacing the equipment, something else is to be put in. It can be that something is used in a particular way, such as that it has to be firewalled or configured in a certain way to make it safer. The idea is that measures would be released.

To respond to Deputy Ó Murchú, a number of vendors in the EU provide a lot of communications network equipment and there is a desire by the EU that vendors and countries diversify and a sense they will be stronger by having a diversified set of equipment. It does not have to be from either of the two major vendors. All countries are keen to promote open RAN and to see that type of open standard and equipment that is less bound to a brand or vendor used throughout.

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