15 years after I first tried to roll out broadband, it’s still a joke

LAST Monday, while driving, I heard my own voice coming back at me, from the car radio. RTÉ was carrying a report on the latest turn of events, for the worse, in the Rural Broadband Scheme. The presenter was giving a history of political promises made to roll out broadband all over the country.

He started with me, when, in 2003, as minister for communications, marine, and natural resources, I announced the then government’s intention to spend €65million on a National Broadband Scheme to get broadband connectivity around the country.

The RTÉ piece carried audio clips from every one of my successors, all of whom promised highspeed broadband connectivity coverage for the entire of the country.

The ministers who came after me, my party colleague, Noel Dempsey, the Green Party’s Eamon Ryan, Labour’s Pat Rabbitte and Alex White, and finally the present incumbent, Denis Naughten, all made commitments to get broadband evenly distributed to corner of the country.

Over the years, the promises got more ambitious, ending with Minister Naughten committing to get high-speed broadband into every business and home in the country. Readers should not doubt the sincerity of the promises made by all of the ministers, including myself. However, as we all found, ‘easier said than done’.

WHEN the Government was formed in 2002, the then taoiseach Bertie Ahern decided to form a new department, pulling the Department of Marine, and portions of two other departments, together. He appointed me as minister, and one of the big challenges I had for the two and a half years I was in that department was to try to knit the hugely diverse department together.

I found myself with sections of the department spread over nine different locations in Dublin. The responsibilities I had varied from the very technical areas of telecommunications and energy, to the more traditional industries of fisheries and forestry.

Also, my department was responsible for approximately 55 semistate bodies, ranging from the ESB, An Post, Bord na Móna, right down to a myriad of fishery boards all around the country. To be honest, it was a logistical nightmare!

Being a bit of a techie, I made no bones of the fact that the area of telecommunications was one of my top priorities. In fact, lobby groups in the forestry sector sarcastically stated that ‘the minister is more interested in broadband, than broadleaf’. When I heard this at the time, inwardly, I couldn’t but agree with them.

Readers will remember that, in the fixed telephone line, and mobile markets, at that time, we had little or no competition. We were in a period, post the sell-off of Eircom, whereby the only way we could try to ensure a level playing field for private operators was to pass legislation to give proper powers to the independent telecommunications regulator, Comreg.

Leaving aside the pros and cons of selling off Eircom, I was left with a situation whereby, in the fixed telephone sector, we had gone from having a State monopoly to a virtual private monopoly, and this was something I had to address. We were faced with the situation whereby Eircom owned every telephone line going into every house and business premises in the country. I arranged for the passing of legislation to ensure that Eircom had to open up their telephone lines, subject to a rental price, to other competitors in this area.

It has to be said, slowly but surely, over the intervening years, this has led new competition to the Eircom dominance. Readers will know that, given the rapid development of mobile telephony, competition in that area was somewhat easier to promote.

During my three years in the department, I had continuous arguments with the then finance minister, Charlie McCreevy, and his officials about policy in this area. I maintained that the State had a huge responsibility so as to ensure that there would not be a digital divide in the country, whereby only urban areas would have access to high-speed broadband, and that rural areas would not have access to the same facility. I was adamant that spreading broadband into the rural parts of the country was even more important than providing improved road infrastructure into those areas.

I forecasted that if we did not do something about this, our country would be hugely unbalanced as between urban and rural areas. When I raised the issue of the Exchequer, through my department, spending money on putting in fibre-optic cable into major towns and villages in the country, I came up against a brick wall. It was bluntly said to me ‘the State has exited the telecommunications market, so why are we getting back into it?’ I had stand-up rows at meetings over it.

I maintained that, if we were to rely on private operators to spread broadband connectivity throughout the country, we were fooling ourselves; that, by their nature, they would cherry pick the more lucrative urban areas, and ignore the more sparsely populated areas throughout the country. Eventually, I was told that I was going to get no extra money for this, outside of the overall amount allocated to my department, and that if I wanted to start a National Broadband Scheme, I would have to find the money to do so, from ‘existing resources’.

In other words, if I proceeded to do this, other areas within my brief would have to have their allocated resources reduced. I did this, hence the above announcement which I made in 2003. I detected huge resistance from other commercial interests in the sector. We commenced a procurement process, asking private operators to tender for a contract to put fibre-optic cable into the larger towns and villages around the country, and that other more rural and remote areas would be serviced by a mobile or satellite service, from these locations.

IN 2004, not long after we commenced the scheme, I was moved on to Foreign Affairs but, from then until now, I have always kept a close eye on developments or, more precisely, lack of developments in this area. It has to be said that with the advances of mobile technology, and, undoubtedly more competition in the fixed line area, the broadband spread in the country is much better than it was a decade and a half ago.

However, the more coverage across the country, the closer we are getting to dealing with the ‘hardcore’ isolated areas. Relatively large urban areas are still reliant on only one operator with no immediate prospect of competition entering their area. A statistic often quoted to me, when I was in that department, was that, per head of population, we have the highest proportion of small rural roads in Europe. Our tendency to build one-off houses in more isolated parts of the country made it much more difficult to get infrastructure, such as broadband, into those locations.

So, it is a grave disappointment to me, and, I’ve no doubt, to all of my successors, that, so many years on, there are still huge deficits in this area. At the end of the day, resources are the issue. Private operators will not go into isolated areas unless it is financially worth their while. It comes down to the age-old battle between ‘risk and reward’. Who will shoulder the risk, the taxpayer or the commercial operator? And which of them will benefit? Obviously, during the downturn, there were insufficient Exchequer funds to invest in this area, but now that the State coffers are in a much healthier position, the present minister and Government must put sufficient funds into the existing broadband scheme to ensure that their stated policy of providing high-speed broadband to every home and business in the country is realised. Without that, the rural areas will continue to lag behind their urban neighbours in this vital provision.