Brendan Griffin (Kerry South, Fine Gael)
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437. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources if he will withdraw the national broadband scheme contract from a service provider in County Kerry in view of the totally inadequate service it is providing to customers; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [50337/13]

Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)
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The broadband service contracted under National Broadband Scheme (NBS) is a basic, affordable, scalable product in keeping with EU State Aid clearance for the Scheme in September 2007. Under the terms of the contract which my Department has in place with Hutchison 3G Ireland Ltd (trading as “3”), the NBS mobile wireless service currently offers minimum download and upload speeds of 2.3Mbps and 1.4Mbps respectively, subject to a maximum contention ratio of 18:1. The NBS satellite service, which is utilised in a small number of cases for technical reasons associated with the location of the premises, offers minimum download and upload speeds of 3.6Mbps and 384 kbps respectively, subject to a maximum contention ratio of 48:1.

My Department has well-established monitoring arrangements in place to ensure that the NBS delivers the minimum specified service or better to all users. The NBS contract guarantees service levels and imposes a service credit regime on “3”, with significant financial consequences in the event that minimum specification service levels are not met. The NBS contract also provides that where NBS customers do not receive the minimum guaranteed service, as set out in the terms and conditions of their contract, they are entitled to service rebates. As part of 3’s network operations oversight, traffic and utilisation performance data, including site availability across the entire NBS network, is reviewed by "3" on a continuous basis. Remedial action can be taken remotely or 3’s field engineering staff will resolve performance issues at individual sites, depending on the nature of the incident. Annual site maintenance inspections are carried out by "3" on each of its sites. With reference to the site which serves the area referred to by the Deputy, "3" have advised that it underwent an annual inspection last May and no issues were found on that occasion.

I understand from "3", however, that this particular site has experienced a number of outages this year which is regrettable. A combination of planned and unplanned outages caused by technical and weather-related issues led to a number of separate service availability difficulties on the site. Details of the dates of the outages and their duration is set out below.

Moreover, the site in question is currently under investigation as it appears that external interference is disrupting signals from the site and impacting the service available to some customers. “3” have reported this matter to ComReg who are due to visit the site in the coming days. My officials will continue to liaise closely with “3” until this matter is resolved.