Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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169. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources his plans to improve broadband services in County Laois; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2482/16]

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. The commercial telecommunications sector is currently investing approximately €2.5 billion in network upgrades and enhanced services. These very significant investments represent a step change in the quality of broadband services available.

On the 22 December 2015, I formally launched the procurement process for the State Intervention to provide high quality, high speed broadband to all premises in Ireland that may not be served through commercial investment. The formal procurement commenced with the publication of the Project Information Memorandum and the Pre-Qualification Questionnaire. In addition, my Department also published:

- the National Intervention Strategy – updated in December 2015, which takes account of responses to the public consultation which took place in July 2015 and subsequent expert analysis; and

- the High Speed Broadband Map 2020 which follows ongoing engagement with industry and public consultation.

The Intervention strategy sets out a detailed service specification including a requirement 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. It is therefore a matter for bidders to select the technology which will show how they propose to meet these contractual requirements.

The 2020 map is available at . The map shows Ireland with two colours, BLUE and AMBER. The areas marked BLUE represent those areas where commercial providers are either currently delivering or have plans to deliver high speed broadband services by the end of 2016. The areas marked AMBER represent the target areas for the proposed State intervention. Members of the public can see whether their individual premise is in the BLUE or AMBER area by inserting their Eircode, and-or address, or scrolling through the map.

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.

More generally, I am informed by the commercial operators that next generation broadband services have been rolled out to over almost 15,000 premises to date in County Laois with over 5,500 more expected to be serviced by commercial investment. over 16,000 remaining premises in County Laois will be covered either by further commercial investment or the proposed State intervention.