Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 9 May 2017
44. Deputy Timmy Dooley asked the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the status of the national broadband plan; the deadline by which 100% of premises will have access to broadband; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [22087/17]
Amharc ar fhreagraThe purpose of this question is to ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the status of the national broadband plan, the deadline by which 100% of premises to be covered by the plan will have access to broadband and if he will make a comprehensive statement to the House.
I thank Deputy Dooley for his question. The Government's national broadband plan, NBP, will provide high-speed broadband access to all premises in Ireland, regardless of location. The NBP has been a catalyst in encouraging investment by the telecoms sector. That investment has meant that, to date, approximately 1.4 million, or 61 %, of the 2.3 million premises in Ireland can get high-speed broadband of a minimum of 30 Mbps. In April, I signed a commitment agreement with Eir to roll out broadband to an additional 300,000 premises in rural areas on a commercial basis. Eir has committed to concluding this work over the next 85 weeks at an average of one premises being passed every minute of every working day. By the end of 2018, therefore, I expect that 77 % of premises will get high-speed broadband from commercial service providers.
A formal procurement process is under way to select a company or companies that will roll out a new high-speed broadband network within the State intervention area, which comprises approximately 540,000, or 23%, of premises.
The timeframe for the procurement continues to be dependent on a range of factors including the complexities that may be encountered by the procurement teams and bidders during the procurement process. During the Department's extensive stakeholder consultations in 2015, telecommunications service providers indicated a three to five year timeframe to roll out a network of the scale envisaged under the national broadband plan, once contracts are in place.
Shorter term measures to enhance broadband availability, particularly in rural Ireland, are included in the report of the mobile phone and broadband taskforce. I have also signed regulations allowing ComReg to proceed with a 2017 allocation of spectrum in the 3.6 GHz radio spectrum band. This will provide an 86% increase in the total spectrum available for mobile and fixed wireless services. In addition, I have secured an €8 million provision in 2017 for RTE to allow it to commence work to free up the 700 MHz spectrum band which is particularly suited to rural environments. These initiatives should assist in enhancing the quality of mobile phone and data services across Ireland and particularly in rural Ireland. My Department's website, www.dccae.ie, and www.broadband.gov.ie provide comprehensive information including broadband roll-out per county, a copy of the Eir commitment agreement and information on the mobile phone and broadband taskforce.
I look forward to checking out the website to see all of that information, but the one piece of information I suspect will not be there is some kind of a timeline or deadline by which the Minister will have signed the contract. Will the Minister even give us an expected date for the issuance of the contract? I know there have been pre-discussions with selected bidders, and that is all fine, but the Minister needs to put a timeline in place that identifies when the contract is going to be signed. I listened with interest to the Minister on "Morning Ireland" last Friday when he was asked and pressed about achievements by him and his colleagues in government and things they had done. The Minister, Deputy Naughten, spoke of the progress in broadband. It was telling that he said broadband is to be brought to one home or premises in rural Ireland every minute of every working day for the next 86 weeks.
It is 85 weeks now.
Eir is doing that. That is the subject of a commercial decision by a contractor who talked about this in 2015. The Government argued the toss and procrastinated - during a period when Deputy Naughten was and was not the Minister - and it sought a commitment that Eir was going to do it. This allowed the Government to take those 300,000 premises out from the bundle to be funded through State intervention. Technically, the Government's problem has been simplified further. It is now back to some 500,000 premises as there are 300,000 less to do. It does not all lie at the Minister's door but it does lie at the door of the Government. Can the Government stop riding on the back of Eir's commitment on a commercial basis and tell the Chamber when it will publish a timeline for the signing of the contract? We will then proceed with the three or five years that the contractors need to roll it out. We need a commitment. If the Minister is serious about managing his Department he needs to set a date by which the contract will be signed.
The aim of the national broadband plan is to deliver high-speed broadband to every single premises in the State on a commercial and non-commercial basis. Because of the work being done on the national broadband plan we have now ensured that commercial companies, on a commercial basis, are spending €1.7 million every single day and they have been spending that for the last four years. The only reason that Eir sought a commitment agreement with me was because of the national broadband plan and because of the intervention area within the plan. We have been able to tie Eir down to specific targets. They were to have passed 40,000 homes by 31 March last but they have passed 41,000 homes. Deputy Dooley knows, more than anyone in this House, that Eir has previously given very hollow commitments to communities up and down this country and that Eir has actually failed to deliver on them. Now Eir is tied in to a contract where it will be penalised if it does not deliver on it.
The national broadband plan will entail a 25-year contract. We do not want a situation like we had in the past with the Three contract; by the time the contract was signed and rolled out the technology was obsolete. That will not happen in this case. This is a very complex set of negotiations. The contract documents run to 1,000 pages in total and the supplementary documentation is a further 1,000 pages. I am committed to ensuring that we actually deliver to every single home in the country and I am not going to get tied up in dates. Some 12 months ago 52% of premises in the State had access to high-speed broadband. On foot of the commitment agreement and the work we have done over the last 12 months, within the next 85 weeks 77% of premises will have access to high-speed broadband. That is one in four premises in Ireland, the vast majority in rural areas, which will have access to high-speed broadband and the majority of those will be getting up to 1,000 Mbps.
I carry no torch for Eir, but it is a little bit rich of the Minister to criticise Eir or any commercial company for their inability to deliver on commitments. This has been at the Government's door - a Government that the Minister is part of - since 2012. At that stage high-speed broadband was supposed to have been rolled out within three years. We are now in 2017 and a tender has not issued. The Minister must start concentrating on the component that falls at the Government's door, which is the intervention area; the piece that is not commercially viable that the State must fund. The Minister must get the tender documents together and pick a date. He speaks of the project being for 25 years but from the time it was talked about in 2012 it will be 25 years before it will even have started. While the Minister, Deputy Naughten, thinks that dates are not important, I am sure he is dealing with constituents on a daily basis and knows there are children in schools who need access to high-speed broadband to do their studies and reports. These students will have gone through the entire cycle of secondary and tertiary education and still there will be no broadband in their homes. It is important. The Minister is telling us it will be a 25-year plan and that it must be done big. This is fine, but it is having an impact on the daily lives of so many families and small businesses in their inability to gain access to high-speed networks. I hear stories from families where the parents are dropping their children into towns with laptops and iPads to go in to Starbucks, McDonald's or Milano's and such places, in order to get internet access so they can prepare for exams. This is pathetic. People are looking for the Minister to show an understanding of the seriousness of the issue and put in place a deadline, which would force people in the Department, and people who support it, to meet those deadlines. We need action here.
I assure Deputy Dooley that we are getting action because I am not waiting around at all. This is why, as part of the negotiations for the programme for Government, I ensured that we established a mobile phone and broadband taskforce to look at areas where we could fast track the investment of wireless mobile broadband right across the State. This is happening currently. There is not a corner of the country where one does not see the signs up for Imagine; and the best of luck to that company in rolling out its network. We can see the announcements made by Westnet and Ripplecom. There will also be an announcement by another wireless broadband company in the coming weeks. Broadband is being rolled out currently. I want to see the high-speed broadband network rolled out as quickly as possible but it is a fact that we are pushing the roll-out of all avenues in respect of broadband, and the task force is being successful in assisting communications companies in rolling it out across the country.
It is important to remember that every single second level school in the State has access to a minimum of 100 Mbps thanks to the funding that has already been put in place by my Department. The feedback I am getting from schools across the State is that while students would love access to 300 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps, schools are getting access to broadband, mobile broadband and wireless broadband. As soon as is humanly possible they will also get access to high-speed broadband. This is why we have been successful in starting this process. The first communities in Ireland that will have 1,000 Mbps, and which will be in the gigabit society, are rural communities, on foot of the commitment agreement to which we have already signed up.
