The Irish fibre broadband playing field is bound to become even more contested with the arrival of a new super-fast plan created by Eircom.
The company’s ‘gigabit’ plan will theoretically deliver speeds of up to 1000 megabits/s, ten times the speed of its current highest-end broadband plan.
The new service will first be introduced in counties Kilkenny, Cavan, and Letterkenny, and will go directly head to head with ESB and Vodafone’s new €450m fibre network that will deliver superfast broadband to a planned 500,000 households and business across the country.
The ‘gigabit’ plan will pipe fibre cabling directly into the householdhousehold or business premise, as opposed to its current delivery method of connecting fibre network to existing (and older) phone lines.
Eircom has not provided a specific timetable for the rollout of the new service, but a spokesman did confirm that the rollout will happen at the same time of its existing ‘eFibre’ rollout, which is scheduled to connect up to 1.6m homes and businesses by year end of 2016.