Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent)
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224. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the number and percentage of households and commercial premises that have access to fibre optic broadband in areas (details supplied); and if he will make a statement on the matter. [49274/19]

Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent)
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225. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the proportion of the remaining household and commercial premises that have fibre optic broadband to the premises itself, excluding districts to be enabled by the national broadband plan; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [49275/19]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 224 and 225 together.

Premises where commercial providers are not currently delivering or have indicated no plans to deliver high speed broadband services will be addressed through the National Broadband Plan (NBP) State led Intervention.

There is a total of 1,838,932 premises outside the NBP Intervention Area that already have access to high speed broadband.

I attach a table that sets out the number and percentage of premises to be covered through the State Intervention (Amber area) and through commercial investment (Blue area) in the counties identified by the Deputy. The table contains my Department's most up to date statistics, which are for Q3 2019.

Information on the specific towns referred to by the Deputy are available on the High Speed Broadband Map on my Department’s website, www.broadband.gov.ie.

The Blue area is where commercial providers are either currently delivering or have plans to deliver high speed broadband services. The NBP defines high speed broadband as delivering a minimum speed of 30Mbps download and 6Mbps upload in a reliable, high quality and consistent manner. Premises in the Blue area may access a high speed broadband service via various platforms including fibre, many exceeding the definition of high speed broadband.

As the Deputy will be aware, the telecoms market is fully liberalised and regulated by the Commission for Communications Regulation, ComReg. The regulator publishes a quarterly report which highlights trends in the telecommunications industry. This includes the number of subscriptions in Ireland to high speed broadband services by speed (e.g. download speeds of 30 megabits per second) and by platform (fibre, cable, VDSL etc.). The latest report can be found at

Very high speeds are increasingly available across all fixed broadband platforms. Per the ComReg report approximately 79.6% of broadband subscriptions were >=30Mbps (with 33.1% >=100Mbps). This equates to approximately 81.5% (with 35.4% >=100Mbps) of residential subscriptions and 64.0% (with 14.6% >=100Mbps) of business subscriptions.