350 IRISH TOWNS and villages will be the first to experience a new super-fast broadband internet service from later this year.
The new venture’s connection will come in at about 1 gb per second – the gold standard in internet speeds from a corporate point of view.
However, there are no plans to bring the service to Dublin at present.
With the maximum browsing speed available in the capital at the moment being 240 mb/s, this means that rural Ireland’s internet service will soon be four times as fast as that available in Dublin.
The €450 million service is a joint effort between the ESB and Vodafone and will be going live in an initial 50 towns from this autumn.
Among the 50 towns slated to receive the service first are Athlone, Bray, Cavan, Drogheda, Galway, Limerick, and Roscommon.
Once the first 50 towns are up and running, a further 300 rural areas will be next on the list.
“We’ll be looking at the next 300 towns as soon as we have the first 50 started,” chief executive of the venture Sean Atkinson told the Irish Independent.
The launch was announced by Arts Minister Heather Humphreys in Cavan Town, the first town used to trial the technology and situated in her own Cavan/Monaghan constituency.
Humphreys emphasised how the new service will “help to attract investment, boost competitiveness and make it easier for entrepreneurs to expand their businesses online.”
The speeds achievable with the new technology (which operates using the ESB’s existing electricity infrastructure) will put the likes of Cavan on a par with broadband seen in globally advanced cities such as Tokyo and Hong Kong.
The new initiative is the latest such broadband programme to hit Ireland.
Eircom have a similarly speedy service on the way which will be in direct competition with the ESB/Vodafone (who haven’t yet worked out a trading name) venture.
There is also the government’s €500 million National Broadband Plan which is scheduled to connect every Irish household to the broadband network by 2020.
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