National Broadband Plan
Dail Éireann — 2022-09-20
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Ossian Smyth (GP), Dún Laoghaire

I regularly meet with Eir, NBI, the contractors who do the work and everybody in between to make sure that the project is still running. I have met with the new chief executive of Eir and I am convinced that he will continue to improve the roll-out of this system. Deputy Ó Murchú mentioned Eir make-ready which is the preparatory work that Eir does in the year before it hands over the poles and ducts to NBI for its design work. At this stage, the bottleneck is not with NBI anymore, but with Eir. The availability of new connections is not constrained by NBI's work. It has now reached the speed where it is delivering as much as Eir can give it. I have asked Eir to prepare more of its network at a higher rate.
At the same time, Eir is delivering in the commercial area and has much of its staff deployed to bring fibre broadband to areas outside of the intervention area, along with two other companies, Virgin Media and SIRO. If the Deputy looks at the ComReg statistics, he will see there are 10,000 fibre connections in Ireland per month. Those are not homes being passed. They are connections to people's houses.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-09-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-09-20