With the National Broadband Plan failing to meet its 2021 target by almost 50%, Eir has announced plans to extend its gigabit fibre network to an extra 200,000 premises.

The homes and businesses to benefit will be in areas not covered by the government’s NBP, which is supposed to provide fibre broadband to 540,000 premises by 2026. The NBP will add just 60,000 premises ‘passed’ this year, almost 50% short of the 115,000 promised.

Eir’s latest move will mean that its fibre-to-the-home broadband network will reach 1.9 million, almost every home and business outside the NBP intervention area and 84% of the total in the country. The company is investing €1 billion to complete its fibre network.

Most of the 200,000 further potential subscribers are in rural and ‘regional’ areas. Eir says its decision to expand its fibre reach was motivated by increasing customer needs, driven by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The average home and business now needs far greater bandwidth and reliable superfast connectivity to facilitate new ways of working,” says the company, “while maintaining a suitable connection, enabling multiple users to stream videos, make video calls, study remotely and game online.”

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Open Eir managing director Eavann Murphy said: “We continuously monitor the connection rates of our fibre network and we have seen connections to our rural network more than double in the last 18 months, signifying the increased requirements for high-speed connectivity of homes and businesses in Ireland.

“The pandemic has transformed our needs and what was sufficient for the average family home before is no longer adequate.”

The move will be welcomed by many connected to another Eir product, badged as ‘eFibre’ but which still uses copper wire for the ‘last mile’ to the customer’s building, often resulting in speeds too slow to be classed as modern broadband. Bringing the fibre direct to the building will boost speeds from as low as tens of megabits, or even less, to 1,000 megabits per second (1Gbps).

Eir’s fibre network passed 749,000 homes at the end of April, including 340,000 originally earmarked for the NBP.

Photo: Eavann Murphy