Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent)
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114. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources in view of the high percentage of premises without access to broadband in County Donegal, if he will consider an expediency plan for the most rural counties like County Donegal, as the timeline for formal procurement for State intervention is already running into the end of this year with no delays expected; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [31794/15]

Joe McHugh (Donegal North East, Fine Gael)
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The National Broadband Plan (NBP) is a Government policy initiative which aims to deliver high speed broadband to every citizen and business in Ireland. This is being achieved through a combination of accelerated commercial investment by telecoms operators, and a proposed State intervention to provide high speed broadband to those parts of the country where the commercial sector will not invest.

The NBP proposed Intervention Strategy document, which was published on 15 July last, sets out a series of detailed proposals by Government in respect of the proposed State intervention. It sets out the key elements of the intervention - what services are proposed and how they will be delivered. It outlines various aspects of the proposed intervention including the type of network envisaged, the minimum speeds being demanded, the length of the contact for services, and whether the network should be public or privately owned.

The Government is determined to ensure that the network is built out as quickly as possible and engagement with industry stakeholders has indicated that this could be achieved within 3-5 years of the contract award.

In this context, the NBP proposes that through the combination of commercial investment and State intervention, 85% of addresses in Ireland will have access to high speed services by 2018 with all addresses passed by 2020.

The prospective bidder(s) are experts in network roll-out and each will offer different network architectures and technologies to deliver the network. Industry is best placed to determine the sequencing of the network deployment to maximise efficiencies during network build.

It is proposed however to engage with the winning bidder(s) on the optimum rollout strategy, having regard to business and consumer needs, areas of particularly poor service and areas of strong demand. All these factors will need to be balanced against the most efficient network rollout and will be agreed during the procurement process.