Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

464. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources to encourage broadband providers in County Dublin to urgently deal with the lack of adequate broadband provision in the Drimnagh and Inchicore areas and to establish when provision will come onstream. [8271/16]

Alex White (Dublin South, Labour)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The provision of electronic communications infrastructure, including the significant investment required to make high speed telecommunication services publicly available, occurs within a fully liberalised market. It is a matter for the competing networks providers to decide those areas which can be served on a commercial basis, in the first instance. Intervention by the State is limited to investment or co-investment in those areas of the country the commercial market will not serve.

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 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 and includes large areas of Inchicore and Drimnagh in Dublin.  The Department continues to monitor the commercial deployment plans in the BLUE area to ensure that all of the 1.6m premises, where commercial operators have committed to providing services will have access to High Speed Broadband of at least 30mbps.

The areas marked AMBER represent the target areas for the State Intervention. Members of the public can view whether their premises is in the BLUE or AMBER area by accessing the High Speed Broadband Map and entering their Eircode.

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.

The intention is to build out the network in the AMBER area as quickly as possible. The Department will engage with the winning bidder(s) 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 addresses in Ireland will have access to high speed services by 2018, with all addresses passed by 2020.