The Government has insisted that the pace of connections to high-speed broadband has accelerated in recent months, although it will still be at least five years before some premises have access to the best services.
National Broadband Ireland, which is developing the high-speed fibre network for rural parts of the country, today announced its 30,000th connection under the National Broadband Plan.
It said that 118,000 premises across 26 counties are ready to connect, through one of its 60 retail partners.
"We're hearing back from connected customers that minimum speeds of 500 megabits per second are transformational, for businesses looking to expand and diversify, and for families accessing multiple devices online at the same time," CEO of National Broadband Ireland, Peter Hendrick, said today.
He said householders and businesses can check the nbi.ie website, using their Eircode, to find out if their property is ready to be connected.
Steineberg Fireplaces, a family-run business which has been operating outside Waterford city for over 40 years, was declared to be the 30,000th connection to NBI.
Ciara Barry of Steineberg Fireplaces said the change has been huge, with the business unable to offer basic services such as card payments and online orders until recently.
"It was a nightmare really… We’re in a blackspot here so it was really hard, the internet was always really so bad and if people wanted to pay by card which people nearly always want to do these days, we were like "we have no card machine" because it wouldn’t go through with the internet.
"But since we’ve got the new internet we’ve got the card machine up and running now and it’s a life-changer," Ms Barry explained.
"We had the website before but we didn’t use it much because people were putting stuff through on it and we weren’t getting to it then because the internet was just so bad here so it was kind of a nightmare, but since we’ve got the new broadband up and running now it’s great."
Minister of State for Communications, Ossian Smyth, said that full-fibre broadband subscriptions are now at 463,000, representing almost 19.5% coverage of all homes and businesses in the State.
"It really was going slowly at the start but it started to pick up then, we got over a number of initial problems, were slowed down by the pandemic a little bit, but now it’s really started to accelerate and we’re ahead of where we expected to be at the end of the year," he said.
"The project is on pace now, it’s picking up speed, it’s back on track."
The target is that by 2028, "every single home and business in the whole of Ireland will have access to gigabit broadband," the minister said, "but in the rural area, in the intervention area of the National Broadband Plan, those half a million homes will have access by the end of 2026".
He accepted that the connections "can’t come soon enough" but said they are happening at a rate of about 80,000 per year, between providers in urban areas and the likes of the National Broadband Plan which covers many rural areas.
"It can’t be done in one year, it’s a project that is going to be complete by 2026 and we have as much resources as we possibly can going into it."
He said that the project, at a cost of €2 billion, is "way ahead" of other countries in Europe.
