Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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The National Broadband Plan (NBP) aims to ensure high speed broadband access (minimum 30 megabits per second) to all premises in Ireland, regardless of location. This is being achieved via a combination of commercial investment and a State led intervention.

The NBP State Intervention contract is the Government’s plan to rollout high speed broadband to the 1.1 million people living and working in the nearly 540,000 premises including almost 100,000 businesses and farms, along with 695 schools where commercial operators will not commit to deliver the service.

As required by the State Aid Guidelines for Broadband, the NBP procurement process adopted a technology neutral approach. It did not mandate the delivery of service by any specific material or infrastructure. However, it is noteworthy that all bidders in the process proposed a predominantly fibre to the home solution.

The Deputy's Question relates to premises which are located in the AMBER area on the NBP High Speed Broadband Map, which is available on my Department's website at www.broadband.gov.ie. The AMBER area represents the area to be served by the network to be deployed under the NBP State led Intervention, the contract for which was signed on 19 November with National Broadband Ireland (NBI).

Work has already begun and a deployment plan will be made available by NBI shortly. All counties will see premises passed in the first 2 years and over 90% of premises in the State will have access to high speed broadband within the next four years.

The attached table below shows the breakdown of the 12,145 premises across the four Dublin local authority areas, which do not have access to high speed broadband, based on my Department's premises database from Q3 2019. Please note that the Department holds data in county and constituency format, rather than by local authority area.