National Broadband Ireland (NBI) has signed its public private partnership contract with the Irish government to deliver the National Broadband Plan across Ireland.

The company said surveying and design teams will start work in January in the first deployment locations. These include Carrigaline in Cork, parts of Connemara in west Galway, and several towns in the counties of Kilkenny and Limerick.

NBI says c.650 people will be employed directly and indirectly over the first 12 months of the NBP, and 90% of these will be employed locally in each of the deployment areas.

NBI’s partners and subcontractors include the KN Group, Kelly Group, Actavo, 4Site and Nokia, who will provide many of these positions, with boots hitting the ground in January. NBI says its current team of 60 people will grow to c.225 over the first 20 months of the NBP contract.

NBI’s first priority is setting up 300 Broadband Connection Points, where the public can access free high speed internet access. The first of these will be delivered in Q2 2020, and all will be connected by the end of 2020. These will provide public access at hubs such as libraries, community centres, schools and local GAA facilities.

In Association with

To publicise the agreement, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, communications minister Richard Bruton and David McCourt attended St Kevin's National School at Brockagh, Ballard, in Co Wicklow (below).

A new NBI website has launched today where the locations of these BCPs can be identified, and the public can register their interest for NBP updates.

NBI said that once it has integrated the final roll-out area map of 537,000 premises into its network design, it will be possible to check with an Eircode if a premise is in the rollout area, with an indicative date of when it will be passed with fibre. The company gave no indication about when this will happen.

NBI chairman David McCourt (pictured) aid: “The National Broadband Plan is a momentous infrastructure project to empower rural Ireland. It’s our mission to put an end to the digital divide nationwide."

NBI chief executive officer Peter Hendrick said the NBP roll-out will involve laying 146,000km of fibre cable. The full deployment across 96% of Ireland’s land mass will take five to seven years, he added, though c.250,000 rural residents will be passed with fibre by the end of 2021.

Through 2020, only the 300 Broadband Connection Points will be connected to the new NBP network.

Pix: Julien Behal