James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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15. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the next steps his Department will take to find a new fibre line if a fibre cabinet is full following National Broadband Ireland intervention; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [52173/25]

Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael)
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The National Broadband Plan is being delivered on time and within budget, a clear example of Government delivering on its promises and ensuring no community is left behind.

National Broadband Ireland (NBI) are building an individual wholesale high speed fibre network to serve the NBP Intervention area, which includes 564K premises, equating to connecting circa 1.1 million people across Ireland.

Over 431,900K premises are Available to Order or Pre-Order today and the remaining premises are actively being progressed to the detailed build phases to ensure they are connected by the end of deployment.

In relation to the reference to fibre cabinets, it is important to note that NBI does not use fibre cabinets as they are traditionally used in other Network implementations. These are generally associated with earlier ‘fibre to the cabinet’ deployments, which are different in design from NBI’s fibre to the premises network.

NBI do use existing physical infrastructure where possible to locate its equipment in the Intervention Area, but where this existing infrastructure is capacity constrained or limited in any way, NBI add new infrastructure to house this.

Fibre to the premises is a more futureproofed network, in line with the requirements set out in the National Broadband Plan. It delivers higher speeds and more consistent performance, giving households, businesses and communities the reliability and performance that is needed for working from home, cloud services, business applications and seamless streaming.

On the question of capacity, the NBI network has been carefully designed with full deployment measured and indeed has gone further to prepare for the future.

To allow for natural growth, NBI has included an additional 25 per cent fibre capacity across the network to ensure that new premises can be connected promptly using this additional fibre capacity. This can be seen in how the rollout has grown over time. At the start of the Project, the Intervention Area included 537K premises. Today, the Intervention area covers more than 564K premises, with an additional 25% capacity.

In short, the NBI rollout is not only delivering high speed fibre connections today but is also designed with appropriate built-in capacity and flexibility to support the growth of our communities, our businesses and our economy in the years to come.