Ireland’s incumbent operator eir says that as part of its ongoing fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) rollout programme over 208,000 homes and businesses across 143 communities in county Cork will have access to high speed broadband when its wholesale division – open eir – has finished its ‘open access’ works. Currently, 178,500 homes and businesses across 101 communities in the county can avail of high speed broadband with speeds of up to 100Mbps, a figure that will top the 200,000 mark when the EUR55 million (USD58.4 million) programme completes in 2018. Open eir is reportedly working on the upgrade of services in 95 communities, promising peak speeds of up to 1Gbps, it says. The works take in over 27,000 homes and businesses across Cork, including the West Cork communities of Castletownbere, Glengarriff, Schull, Skibbereen, Clonakilty and Kinsale.
Carolan Lennon, Managing Director of open eir, claims: ‘No other operator in the market is investing more or rolling out fibre to the scale that we are. We have made commitments to bring high speed broadband to as many communities as possible across Ireland – and this includes communities in rural Ireland. Today 70% of the country has access to high speed broadband and that will continue to rise. This includes 101 communities in Cork. But we are not stopping there. We will provide best-in-class solutions with unparalleled speeds to a number of additional communities in the county by the end of 2018.’
TeleGeography notes that nationally, open eir continues to make headway on the rollout of Ireland’s open access fibre broadband network. To date it has enabled 1.6 million homes and businesses nationwide to access its high speed FTTx services. When complete, a national network of 1.9 million premises will have access to fibre, it says. As an open access network any broadband provider can sell TV, broadband and phone services using the infrastructure. There are currently 15 telecoms companies using the network to provide TV and broadband services across Ireland.