High-speed broadband will be everywhere by 2020 - White

Every home and business in the country will have high-speed broadband by 2020, the Government has said. Minister for Communications Alex White has promised the country will have blanket high-speed broadband.

He likened the project to rural electrification in the 1940s and said the Government was anxious to avoid another Irish Water by ensuring the project was done properly.

"One of the reasons we are giving this the time needed is that we are going to do this right. We are not just going to keep announcing it. This is getting stuck into delivering this," he told The Irish Times.

Mr White stressed there was no quicker timetable that could be put forward to ensure that every premises got high-speed broadband. “I’m talking about high-speed, high-quality, future-proofed broadband. The various different services out there will not cover the entire map. We will cover the whole map. That’s our intention.”

Some 600,000 homes and 100,000 business premises in Ireland, almost one-third of all in the State, will still be without high-speed broadband (a minimum of 30 megabits per second) by the end of 2016.

The 30Mbps threshold has been judged as the minimum required for fully functioning broadband. By the end of 2016, all but 1 per cent of premises in Dublin will have high-speed broadband, but 64 per cent of premises in Roscommon, the worst-affected county, will be without it.

Connacht and Ulster

More than half of all premises in both Connacht and Ulster are in areas where there will still be no commercial high-speed broadband by the end of that period, and it will be provided by the State.

Mr White said it was clear high-speed broadband was the single most important issue in rural Ireland. “We cannot afford not to do it. There was a time not so long ago when broadband was regarded as something of a luxury, now it is an absolute necessity.”

He stressed the Cabinet was behind the project, but declined to put a price on it for commercial reasons. However, it will be in the hundreds of millions of euro. “Companies will be fighting for this project,” he said.

Funding will come, not just from the State, but potentially from the European Investment Bank, the World Bank, NewEra or the State's strategic investment fund.

The Department of Communications has published a map showing the areas that will be covered by the commercial sector by the end of 2016 (broadband.gov.ie).

The State will intervene to provide the infrastructure for the 32 per cent of premises which are in areas not covered. The contract will have to be approved by the European Commission to see if it complies with EU state aid rules.

Out to tender

It will go out to tender towards the end of next year. The preferred bidder will start the contract in 2016 and it will take three to five years to roll it out for the whole country.

Mr White said there was no quicker way of doing this and it needed to be got right first time. It remains to be decided if one company or several will deliver the infrastructure.

“The delivery of high-quality broadband is about ensuring that our citizens in rural Ireland have the same life chances, and the same access to information, culture, ideas, social interaction and opportunity that people in urban areas can enjoy. It’s also about jobs in the rural economy,” he said.