Cavan gets broadband four times faster than dublin

Paul Neilan

Cavan Town is to be the first location in the country to get super-fast broadband - a service capable of delivering speeds four times faster than the best that’s available in Dublin at the moment - a Monday meeting at council chambers has heard. However, politicians are still concerned about black spots in rural Ireland.

A full chamber of politicians and members of the public heard from acting county CEO Ger Finn on, how upon accepting his first job with the council, he had to use a wind-up public telephone in Bawnboy. “We’ve come a long way since then”. He said he was “delighted” that Cavan Town had been chosen for the first roll-out of services from an ESB-Vodafone joint-venture.
CEO at the new as yet unnamed company Sean Atkinson told the 100-odd gathered that speeds of 1,000 megabytes, or one gigabyte per second, were possible for local consumers and businesses - “that’s ten times the speed available”.
Mr Atkinson said that half a million homes and businesses would be connected this Autumn in Phase 1 of the roll-out, which would see the county town first connected after two trials at two estates, Aughnaskerry and Rocklands, returned “very positive” feedback on a project that will see €450m invested.
He described the ‘100% Fibre to the Building’ project as “the most ambitious in Ireland” saying that 50 towns had been chosen nationally and that Vodafone had invested €1bn already with another €550m on the way over the next three years.
Vodafone, the meeting heard, had been chosen as partners after a tender by ESB last July and had been up and running since November.
ESB’s Trevor Lucey said fibre-optic cables providing broadband had been installed both underground and overhead along the existing electrical network provided by ESB with the two focal points being the electrical sub-stations at Derrycramp and Drumalee.
“The Cavan Town trial brought this initiative to life,” he said, describing the trials as “unprecedented” and a “great milestone”.

Stephen O’Connor, director of corporate affairs at ESB-Vodafone said that definition of broadband was 25 megabytes per second and that, if served by a fibre connection in population centres like Cork and Dublin, people could be experiencing up to 240 megabytes per second but that “ours is over four times the maximum speed in Dublin and ten times that of a copper wire service”.

For more on this story, see tomorrow's Anglo-Celt newspaper.