Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael)
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63. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources the status of his Department's ongoing interaction with a company (details supplied) on the roll out of broadband in the newly highlighted light blue areas of the national broadband plan; when he expects formal timelines to be put on these rollouts; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [21893/17]

Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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The National Broadband Plan (NBP) aims to deliver high speed broadband services to every city, town, village and individual premises in Ireland. The Programme for Government commits to the delivery of the NBP as a matter of priority.  This is being achieved through a combination of commercial investment by the telecommunications sector and a State intervention in those areas where commercial investment has not been fully demonstrated. 

A key principle of the NBP is to support and stimulate commercial investment through policy and regulatory measures. Commercial investment since the publication of the NBP has considerably exceeded expectations. To date, the commercial telecommunications sector has invested over €2.5bn in upgrading and modernising networks which support the provision of high speed broadband and mobile telecoms services. 

There has been significant progress in relation to broadband rollout so that today, approximately 1.4m or 61% of premises in Ireland can get high speed broadband of a minimum of 30 Megabits per second. The NBP has been a catalyst in encouraging investment by the telecoms sector, which is continuing to expand this footprint.

In accordance with procedures set out by my Department in December 2015, in late 2016 my Department initiated a review of an eir proposal to rollout fibre to over 300,000 premises in rural areas on a commercial basis.  These premises were in areas that had formed part of the procurement process for the NBP State Intervention area. This analysis is complete and on 4 April, I signed a commitment agreement with eir in relation to its plans to provide broadband to an additional 300,000 premises in rural areas on a commercial basis.  Eir has committed to completing the rollout over a 90 week period, an average of 500 premises passed per day.  In line with the published Agreement there are regular Review Meetings the purpose of which is to monitor this rollout and ensure that eir meets its obligations under the Agreement.  A copy of the Commitment Agreement is available on my website . 

Quarterly updates will be published on the Departments website.  The Q1 2017 update will be published in May and I am pleased to announce that the eir rollout is in line with the Commitment Agreement.  My Department has informed me that in the period from 1 January to end March 2017 30,064 premises have been passed. This brings to 40,114 the total subset of the 300k premises that eir has passed since they commenced work in late 2016.  

Information on eir's planned rural deployment is available at .