Reports of worsening coverage "anecdotal" says ComReg

ComReg Commissioner Mr. Kevin O'Brien: On the two general points the Chairman made, certainly society's needs have changed. The step change where we see the market delivering to about 70% of the population with high-speed networks is to be welcomed. We have had huge progress in the past two years in that regard. As colleagues in the Department have pointed out, the challenge now is to make those high-speed fixed networks available to everybody in the country. From ComReg's perspective, we think the Department's ambition is correct. We believe it is correct to seek to have something future-proofed. One will always look back and say it was never possible, but one should try to build it once and build it well for the rural areas.

Anecdotal is a good way to describe people's comments on mobile coverage. ComReg gets approximately 30,000 complaints or issues brought to its attention a year. In the year to date some 17,000 issues by individual consumers have been brought to our attention. Of those 300 are complaints about mobile coverage. That is probably slightly more than in previous years, but there are other issues that are bigger for consumers in our experience. So coverage is certainly a topic.

I will make a few comments on what is going on in the marketplace. As I said earlier, on foot of the auction the operators are now upgrading to 4G; so there are changes to the networks throughout the country. We have the operators also changing some of their network structures and network share arrangements. So there is considerable activity at the infrastructural level and that can have implications.

There is also some evidence that while a smart phone does amazing things - compared with what we carried out in our pockets ten years ago the utility is fantastic - from time to time questions are raised over smart phones' capacity regarding voice calls. So there is a technical issue with the hardware which is commented on from time to time. With 100% of the population expecting to see a voice signal there all the time, 60% with smart phones expecting to see at least a 3G signal there all the time and now 300,000 people expecting to see a 4G signal there all the time, expectations have gone up. Networks are being built and there is perhaps some limited sense that in certain cases coverage is not what it could be. However, what we see coming is somewhat limited in that regard.

Chairman of Committee :John O'Mahony It is not just that it is not what it could be; the issue is that it is not what it was.

DCENR: Ms Katherine Licken: I might just add to that. We mentioned working on barriers to deployment. One of the work streams the Department has is working with the NRA on access to infrastructure along the motorway - the ability to erect masts and antennae along or adjacent to motorways. The motorways were built through areas that were previously not built-up areas and would not have had high mobile usage. That is one of the areas where we believe there is a particular problem and we are working to address it. Some of the operators are saying - this is where it might be helpful to have them in - that if a person is on a 4G call and moves from a 4G cell to a 2G cell, quite often that call will drop. It is back to handsets and also the band in which the person is making the call.

Operators are saying sometimes there are temporary outages as they start to upgrade areas from 2G or 3G to 4G. It is correct to say that something has happened all right. We are aware of some - possibly not all - of it. It is an issue that would be good to take up with industry also.