Fixed broadband provider Eircom has rolled out 100Mbps fibre speeds to 50,000 households in Limerick, according to Limerick Leader, citing a comment from the telco’s CEO Richard Moat. The town of Askeaton is billed as the next to receive ultra-high speed fibre, before Eircom extends its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) coverage to rural villages by mid-2016. Meanwhile, the operator plans to beat rival Vodafone Ireland – which recently entered into a fibre venture with the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) to the launch of superfast 1Gbps fibre services – saying: ‘We are rolling out FTTH in 66 communities, exactly the same that ESB and Vodafone joint venture have said they are going to. This is our strategic response. We are actually building in 16 of these towns at the moment … we hope to get regulatory approval to start selling this product in the summer. The most recent announcement I saw from Vodafone was that they were going to launch at the end of 2015 at the earliest, so we will be launching well before that.’
As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, Eircom commenced work on the FTTH rollout in November last year, with the project running in parallel to its fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) rollout, which is set to pass 1.6 million Irish homes by mid-2016.
