With over forty years of experience in telecommunication Pat is currently Director of Fibre Programmes in open eir, Ireland’s largest network operator. For the majority of his career he have been building networks, first focusing on copper but for the last twelve years he has been working on fibre rollout.  Initially Pat headed up open eir’s FTTC programme, passing 1.6m homes with this technology.  For the last eight years he has led open eir’s fibre to the home rollout, originally focused on a rural deployment to 350,000 premises.  In recent years Pat has managed an urban FTTH deployment, where the challenges involved in working in a more mature and dense environment have to be overcome.  Exploring new methods of rolling out fibre in a faster and more economical way is a continual focus for Pat.