Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)
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22. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources if this Government is committed to providing fibre broadband to every household in County Donegal; if not, the reason for same; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [16202/15]

Alex White (Dublin South, Labour)
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The National Broadband Plan will deal conclusively with Ireland's connectivity challenge so that current and future generations will have a guaranteed access to high quality, high speed broadband, provided by commercial operators or through the proposed State intervention. The intervention network we wish to see built will 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, the step change in broadband quality demanded by the EU Commission’s State Aid guidelines, the exponential growth in demand from consumers and the on-going significant improvement in services that will be available to 70% of Irish premises through commercial investment, it is anticipated that a considerable level of fibre connectivity will be an important aspect of any network that it built, regardless of how the final access to the customer is delivered.

This is in line with the provisions of the State Aid Guidelines which point to the desirability of deploying fibre networks as close as possible to end-users. Through a variety of technology platforms, retail telecommunications providers will then able to use this wholesale network to offer services to the final customer.