Openreach has revealed plans to install 'Full Fibre' broadband tech in 94 rural towns and villages across Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland's largest internet infrastructure developer Openreach recently reached a major milestone with the announcement that over 360,000 homes and businesses across Northern Ireland now had access to Gigabit 'full fibre' broadband. While the percentage of coverage has been high within cities and major towns, rural areas have frequently been left behind when it comes to internet connectivity.
Openreach has now revealed plans to bring gigabit broadband to 124 different locations across Northern Ireland, with 94 of them being in rural towns and villages. This follows the recent announcement that the group is recruiting over 100 new apprentice engineers to help it roll out the new infrastructure to homes and business premises.
Standard broadband works by sending signals over the normal phone line, and can only get a few megabit of bandwidth. This technology was superseded by fibre broadband that uses super-fast fibre optic cables between the exchange and your nearest phone cable cabinet, producing speeds of up to 100 megabit. Full fibre is different in that it runs the fibre optic cable all the way to a building, and eliminating that last mile of copper wire enables massive speeds up to 1,000 megabit.
Openreach plans to roll out full fibre broadband to the selected areas over the next two years, and is targeting rural areas with poor coverage as part of a plan to support regional economic recovery. Better internet connectivity is expected to boost job creation in rural areas and help enable people to work remotely.
Openreach NI Director Mairead Meyer commented on the goal: "This is important to us as we look to play a role in the economic recovery and long-term growth of NI. Ensuring that we’re balanced in our build programme is central to this and our engineers are building to over 750 homes every day in both rural and urban areas. In addition, we also have schemes in place, such as our ‘Community Fibre Partnerships, which is bringing broadband to areas that are harder to reach and making sure no one gets left behind."
The full list of rural areas that will benefit from the rollout of full fibre is:
Co. Antrim
Co. Armagh
Co. Down
Co. Fermanagh
Co. Londonderry
Co. Tyrone
Source: Written based on press release
