Northern Ireland broadband roll-out gets green light

Northern Ireland broadband roll-out gets green light

Broadband speeds are to be boosted across Northern Ireland in a project to roll out improved networks to areas which are currently battling with services with very low speeds or an inability to receive broadband at all.

The £24.5 million Northern Ireland Broadband Improvement Project was announced by the Northern Ireland Executive, and will be funded with European money, and with finance from the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport, the BDUK scheme, and BT.

Work is due to begin shortly to survey the current network, which was designed for telephone calls, to assess the capabilities of the infrastructure. But it will be a number of months before engineers begin the process of transforming it into an open access fibre network capable of offering superfast broadband connections.

The Executive’s Enterprise, Trade and Investment Minister, Arlene Foster, said: “The announcement is a further step in improving broadband services across Northern Ireland. It will bring more choice and improve speeds to over 45,000 premises. As a result of previous investments by the Executive, many people across Northern Ireland enjoy some of the best telecoms services in the UK. However, there are areas of Northern Ireland where a fixed line solution is not possible for technical and commercial reasons. This means we have more work to do to ensure that everyone has access to broadband services.”

The contract for the Northern Ireland broadband roll-out was awarded to BT, which has been set a target of December next year to complete the upgrade. The project, which is also involving the Northern Irish agriculture department, is aiming to bring modern technology to some of the most remote parts of the country.

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