Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)
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17. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources if he is committed to providing fibre connection to every household here; if not, the reasons for same; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [3856/15]

Alex White (Dublin South, Labour)
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The National Broadband Plan will deal conclusively with the rural connectivity issues so that current and future generations will have a guaranteed access to high quality, high speed broadband. The network we wish to see built will, therefore, have to be scalable and capable of meeting future anticipated traffic growth.

Whatever the technology used, the proposed intervention must ensure users have a minimum service of 30Mbps and that this can also meet future anticipated growth in traffic and consumer demand for more bandwidth.

In line with the EU competition rules, we must observe a policy of technology neutrality in any State intervention into a competitive market.

However, the scale of the Government’s ambition in regard to the level of service we wish to see available in rural areas, the step change in broadband quality demanded by the EU Commission’s State Aid guidelines, the exponential growth in demand from consumers, the on-going significant improvement in services that is now available to many urban dwellers and businesses through commercial investment as well as the current fibre deficit in much of rural Ireland all point to a major role for fibre in resolving this issue.

In line with the provisions of the State Aid Guidelines, we are likely to adopt an approach that will see the deployment of fibre networks as close as possible to end-users. Through a variety of technology platforms, retail telecommunications providers would then able to use this wholesale network to offer services to the final customer.