Large swathes of Cork’s northside will be among the chosen areas to see the fastest broadband in the country before the end of the year.
Blarney Street, Blackpool, Hollyhill and Shanakiel on the northside, Maryborough on the southside and chunks of Ballincollig will be the first out of the blocks as Siro’s €60m investment into the broadband network in Cork gets under way.
The start date for the project would begin in the final quarter of the year.
While it will take to the second quarter of 2020 before all 75,000 homes and businesses in Cork will be kitted out with the revolutionary speeds, the first customers to receive it will be this year.
Using the existing ESB network, Siro delivers fibre optic cables all the way to the building, it said. Known as fibre-to-the-building, the technology has no copper connections at any point to slow down the network and delivers 1 gigabit speeds.
Downloading a high definition movie that is 4 gigabytes in size with a standard 10 mbps connection currently takes about an hour. With Siro’s promised speeds of up to 1,000 mbps, it will take 30 seconds.
Skibbereen was chosen as the guinea pig for Siro’s technology, after years of poor speeds and lack of coverage.
The West Cork town is now seen as one of the best in the world for broadband connectivity.
Tánaiste Simon Coveney said the new Siro service would be “competitively priced”.
Siro, which pulled out of the long-mooted National Broadband Plan, has formed partnerships with 10 operators such as Vodafone, Sky and BT, is now live in 30 towns across the country, with 10 retailers offering connections to over 185,000 homes and businesses.