Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)

Absolutely. It was fantastic to meet public health nurses from the HSE who advised that they had clients in rural island communities who were badly impacted by people's inability to communicate directly with emergency services or the ability of emergency services to co-ordinate. That is what this initiative will help to resolve.

Any systems deployed for the emergency services have strict requirements for both bandwidth and latency. That is to ensure the highest level of service is always achieved. From the time a radio call button is pressed by a garda anywhere in the country to when it is complete, it is less than 300 milliseconds. That is kind of critical component of infrastructure we are talking about.

To test the full capabilities of the 5G standards, the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer built a private 5G network core that implements the most recent standards for which the public protection and disaster relief, PPDR, services are deployed and tested. Those standards became known as mission critical communications. They will provide an equivalent feature set to that seen on the Trans-European Trunked Radio, TETRA, networks, for example, push-and-talk functionality in emergency situations.

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