Peter Fitzpatrick (Louth, Fine Gael)
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823. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources when the rural broadband scheme will be available in north County Louth and in the Faughart and Hackballscross areas in particular; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [7015/16]

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 is being 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 has invested over €2 billion in network upgrades and enhanced services in the last four years, and is continuing to invest. These very significant investments represent a step change in the quality of broadband services available.

On 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 process commenced with the publication of the Pre-qualification Questionnaire and Project Information Memorandum. Five responses were received from prospective bidders to this stage of the competitive procurement process by the deadline of 31 March. The responses are now being assessed in line with criteria set down by the Department with a view to selecting qualified provider(s) to proceed to the next stage of the procurement. This second stage in the process will be a formal Invitation to Participate in Dialogue (ITPD) to shortlisted  bidders.

The High Speed Broadband Map 2020, which is available at shows the extent of the State Intervention area. The areas marked BLUE represent those areas where commercial providers are either currently delivering or have plans to deliver high speed broadband services. Both areas referred to by the Deputy are BLUE areas. Based on information provided by commercial operators, which may be subject to change, services for Faughart, Mountpleasant, Dundalk are planned to be available within 6 to 12 months. and high speed broadband services are available in Hackballscross since January 2016. The areas marked AMBER represent the target areas for the proposed State intervention. Consumers can see whether their individual premises is in the BLUE or AMBER area by entering their Eircode on the Map.

The intention is to build out the network in the AMBER area as quickly as possible. The procurement process is underway and it is proposed to engage with the winning bidder(s) in due course on the optimum rollout strategy, and on the sequencing of the network deployment to maximise efficiencies during network build, having regard to business and consumer needs, and to 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.

Engagement with industry stakeholders as part of the pre-procurement consultations has indicated that the rollout in the Amber area 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 all premises in Ireland (both commercial and intervention area) will have access to high speed broadband within two years of the contract award, with 100% of premises connected within 5 years.