Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael)
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686. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources the status of the provision of fibre broadband to an area (details supplied) in County Kildare, which has a number of industries and businesses which require high-speed broadband given that the lack of this is affecting their business; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [46366/15]

Alex White (Dublin South, Labour)
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The Government’s National Broadband Plan (NBP) aims to ensure that every citizen and business, regardless of location, has access to a high quality, high speed broadband service. This will be achieved through a combination of commercial investments and a State led intervention in areas where commercial services will not be provided.

In July last I published a detailed draft Intervention Strategy for public consultation. That Strategy proposes that the State-funded network must be capable of delivering high-quality, high speed broadband of at least 30mbps download and 6mbps upload. It must also be capable of catering for higher performance in the future so as to keep pace with consumer demand. This will be a specific requirement of the tender and it will be a matter for bidders to select the technology they consider will best deliver the service.

In accordance with EU State Aid Guidelines, my Department must observe a strict policy of technology neutrality in any procurement process and therefore I am not in a position to promise connectivity through any one particular technology platform. The Department will set out a detailed service specification, including a requirement to scale up services over the lifetime of the contract, and allow bidders to demonstrate how they propose to meet these contractual requirements.

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 an ambition of 100% coverage by 2020.

More generally I am informed by the commercial operators that next generation broadband services have been rolled out to over 55,000 premises to date in County Kildare with over 12,500 more expected to be served by commercial investment. Approximately 20,500 remaining premises in Kildare will be covered either by further commercial investment or the proposed State intervention. The breakdown of premises covered, per townland, is available on the High Speed Broadband Map at .