Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 21 May 2019
529. Deputy Timmy Dooley asked the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the costs arising in the national broadband plan from connecting new fibre assets to metropolitan area networks in which the fibre provided is available through other providers; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [21713/19]
View answerThe costs arising from connecting new fibre assets to Metropolitan Area Networks and national backhaul networks can be broken down into various components, including optical fibre cable of various fibre counts and infrastructure rental covering poles, ducts, and co-location space. Some details of these costs are set out below. NBI have proposed to rent infrastructure from eir and enet as part of its their deployment plan. The main categories of infrastructure involved are; poles, ducts, and co-location space. The rental price of the eir infrastructure to be used for this project is set by ComReg.
Both eir and enet publish a range of rental prices on their websites. For example, the cost information relating to eir's rental cost co-location space is available at the following link: https://www.openeir.ie/Reference_Offers/?selectedtab=aro. enet has published its permitted maximum pricing for ducts, co-location etc. at the following link:
https://www.enet.ie/wholesale-pricing.html)
Information on the cost of renting eir's poles and ducts is available in the recent ComReg Decision notice, available at the following link:
https://www.comreg.ie/publication/pricing-of-eiras-wholesale-fixed-access-services-response-to-consultation-document-1567-and-final-decision/.
The alternative to renting infrastructure which currently exists would be to build an entirely new network, which would significantly increase the cost of the NBP and delay deployment.”
