Ireland’s National Broadband Plan – Independent Certification

In 2012, The Irish Government announced Ireland’s National Broadband Plan to connect some 537,000 premises in an intervention area not adequately served by the Market. Following a procurement process, the contract was awarded in 2019 to a company called National Broadband Ireland (NBI). The project has a budget of €2.6 billion, has an estimated time of seven years to build the network and is managed by The Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications (DECC).

The contract between DECC and NBI mandated the appointment of an Independent Certifier to ensure that the network is built in accordance with the contract and achieves value for money.

Following a comprehensive procurement process, Novegen Ltd and Crowe Ireland were appointed as the Independent Certifier in March 2021 in a tri-partite agreement with NBI and DECC.

The contract between DECC and NBI includes a very comprehensive test strategy outlining the acceptance criteria to be met by NBI to trigger network acceptance and payment. The contract also includes a range of financial, network performance and customer connection Service Level Agreements to be met. The challenge for Novegen was to implement the processes and procedures to test the network against these test criteria and SLAs before issuing Milestone Achievement Certificates within strict contractual turnaround times. There are over seven hundred milestones to be certified in accordance with the terms of the Independent Certifier contract.

Novegen built a team of experienced office and field-based personnel to deliver this project. We utilised various technology platforms to streamline and automate the processes to ensure that Milestones were certified in line with the Independent Certifiers’ contractual obligations.

Responsibilities:

• Review and certify design and build milestones to ensure network quality, contract compliance and value for money.
• Review and provide ongoing observations on the test strategy.
• Ongoing analysis of the certification process to identify efficiencies.
• Ongoing auditing of network build processes.

Deliverables:

• Milestone certification of the design and build of defined Deployment Areas.
• Milestone certification of Operational and Wholesale Product systems.
• Milestone certification of Customer Connections.
• Effective stakeholder engagement and management.

Enablers:

• High-quality experienced resources for both Office & Field-based Quality Assurance.
• In-house Automation tools to facilitate rapid certification of the Build against Design Plan

• As of April 2024, Novegen and Crowe Ireland have successfully issued 387 milestones upon completion of 243K Premises Passed and 80K Premises Connected by NBI.