A Cavan councillor says NBI "should be ashamed" of the "abysmal" National Broadband Plan.
John Paul Feeley was responding to an NBI presentation that revealed thousands of premises in the county face waits of close to five years to be connected under the plan.
At yesterday's meeting of Cavan County Council, Niall Beirne of NBI delivered a presentation on the National Broadband Plan.
While high-speed broadband has been rolled out to 3,600 premises in Cavan Town, areas like Bailieborough, Bawnboy, Dowra, and Kingscourt could be waiting until the end of 2026 to be connected.
John Paul Feely praised the work of the county's Broadband officer, Daniel Peeters, and also praised the county's 12 Broadband Connection Points, but he hit out at the "abysmal" number of premises that have been connected under the National Broadband Plan.
It had been planned that 115,000 premises nationwide would be passed under the plan by this stage, but only 55,000 have been passed so far.
While Councillor Feely acknowledged that the pandemic has "hampered" the roll-out, he told the meeting that the backlog caused "will not be made up due to the way NBI is behaving".
He added that NBI "doesn't seem to any plan for how they will make it up".
Niall Beirne said he "clearly disagrees" with the claim that NBI doesn't have a plan to make up these covid-related backlogs.
Mr Beirne said it will be from 2023 onwards that NBI begins to "clawback" these losses.
