Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 16 May 2019
150. Deputy Declan Breathnach asked the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the number of houses and properties that do not have poles or infrastructure nearby to provide broadband connections to such properties from the roadway without major investment. [21255/19]
View answerThe Department and National Broadband Ireland (NBI) have completed high level designs to determine the quantities of existing infrastructure that can be re-used and quantities of new infrastructure that will need to be deployed to deliver the NBP project.
In addition, NBI has completed a number of low-level designs to corroborate the assumptions made in the high level designs. The Department has separately completed several network models and associated cost models down to the premises level.
The high level designs take into account the various passive infrastructure databases (i.e. buildings, poles and ducts) as well as the Eircode database of premises. This analysis outlines that nearly 99% of the premises in the intervention area are 150 metres or less from the road and the vast majority of these are less than 50 metres from the road.
Once the deployment commences a detailed design process will be conducted by NBI which is referred to as the low-level design. This low level design includes a detailed site survey of each route and each premises to be served on that route. The site survey will confirm what infrastructure is in place and what infrastructure will be required in order to enable a connection to be made to each premises. Every effort will be made to reduce costs by utilising existing infrastructure. In the cases where there are ‘difficult to serve’ premises NBI will consider alternative solutions to deliver the high speed broadband service.
