Ireland's national broadband plan (NBP), announced in 2012, aimed to provide access to a minimum of 30 Mbps download speed to all households in the country ahead of the EU's Digital Agenda for Europe 2020 target for such speeds. The projected cost of the government subsidy was originally €175 million. However, when the contract for the procurement of the NBP was eventually signed in 2019 the estimated subsidy had risen to between €2.2 and €2.9 billion. Using a path dependency framework, this paper finds that the escalation in the cost of subsidy was driven by two main factors. First, the decision to roll out fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology was inconsistent with the geographic/legacy path dependencies related to Ireland's low-density rural population. Second, the gap-funding/PPP procurement model adopted for the intervention failed to attract competitive bids and was at odds with the competitive path dependency and the dominant role of the incumbent operator.

爱尔兰的国家宽带计划 (NBP) 于 2012 年宣布，旨在在欧盟 2020 年欧洲数字议程目标之前为该国所有家庭提供最低 30 Mbps 的下载速度。政府补贴的预计成本最初为 1.75 亿欧元。然而，当最终在 2019 年签署采购 NBP 的合同时，估计补贴已上升至 2.2 至 29 亿欧元之间。使用路径依赖框架，本文发现补贴成本的上升是由两个主要因素驱动的。首先，推出光纤到户 (FTTP) 技术的决定与爱尔兰低密度农村人口相关的地理/传统路径依赖性不一致。其次，