Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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In December 2022, my Department published Ireland's Digital Connectivity Strategy which supports the ambition outlined in the National Digital Strategy and sets out a number of ambitious targets, including that:

• all Irish households and businesses will be covered by a Gigabit network no later than 2028
• all populated areas will be covered by 5G no later than 2030, and
• digital connectivity will be delivered to all schools and broadband connection points by 2023

These targets will be achieved through commercial operators investing in their networks, complemented by the State’s National Broadband Plan intervention. When taken together, all premises in the State will have access to high-speed broadband in every part of the country no matter how remote.

The BLUE area represents those areas where commercial providers are either currently delivering or have plans to deliver high-speed broadband services. The Department defines high-speed broadband as a connection with minimum speeds of 30Mbps download and 6Mbps upload. The activities of commercial operators delivering high-speed broadband within BLUE areas are not planned or funded by the State and the Department has no statutory authority to intervene in that regard. There may be a choice of operators offering this service in any given area. Further information in this regard is available at www.comreg.ie/compare/#/services.

If a person lives in the BLUE area and after contacting their Retail Service Provider are told they cannot get access to greater than 30Mbps, they should raise a query via the DECC webform at secure.dccae.gov.ie/forms/NBP-Customer-Service.aspx and DECC will escalate with open eir to investigate this matter further.

For individual queries received through the Department’s Broadband webform, the location of the premises being investigated is compared against the available commercial operators’ plans, where these plans have been voluntarily shared with the Department. This is to confirm if there are forthcoming commercial plans to provide high-speed broadband to serve the premises in question. Therefore, the current lack of high-speed broadband availability in these areas, may be resolved by commercial operators in the short to medium term. As a result of the planned commercial activity mentioned above, the Department considers it to be prudent, to only reclassify premises in the most exceptional circumstances and include them in the Intervention Area. For example, where there may be a very small number of mapping anomalies identified, adding them to the IA will not impact on the existing detailed design from NBI for the immediate area. There may also be a limited number of premises that cannot be served by the eir Commitment Agreement that are returned to the IA.

The number of premises added to the Intervention area were 17,000 in 2021, 8,000 in 2022 and 2,600 in 2023.

In order to ensure that we are meeting the "Gigabit" targets as mentioned in the Digital Connectivity Strategy, my officials are continuously evaluating opportunities for adding premises to the Intervention Area, where appropriate. Alternatively, where it is not feasible for premises to be recategorised, we are addressing the issues through the Mobile Phone and Broadband Task Force (the Taskforce).

The Taskforce comprises State actors and industry representatives and is tasked with identifying and overcoming barriers to improved connectivity. The Taskforce was originally established in 2016 to identify immediate solutions to mobile phone and broadband coverage deficits, and to investigate how better services could be provided to consumers prior to full build and rollout of the network planned under the National Broadband Plan State intervention (NBP).

Commercial operators’ fibre rollouts are progressing at pace. Open eir have already passed over 1.1 million homes. SIRO has recently reached a milestone of enabling over 545,000 premises for full fibre and is on track to reach 700,000 premises by 2026. Virgin Media recently announced a €200 million investment plan to upgrade its cable network to bring full fibre to up to 1 million premises over the next three years, to date it has passed 252,000 premises with full fibre.

Recent ComReg data shows that Quarter 2 of 2023 saw a 7.4% increase in fibre broadband subscriptions compared to the first 3 months of the year, and a 33.7% increase when compared to Quarter 2 of 2022. This demonstrates that take-up of fibre connectivity for homes and businesses is increasing substantially as it is deployed to areas where it had previously been unavailable. The same ComReg data also indicates that c. 40% of homes and business throughout the State now have access to gigabit services through either fibre (576,856) or cable (359,669) infrastructure.