Ireland's broadband eyes will be smiling even more next year when the country's former telecom monopoly eircom lights up its FTTH (fiber to the home) trial next year. Promising to deliver 150 Mbps of bandwidth, the trial will serve about 10,000 residential and business customers in Sandyford, County Dublin and in Wexford.
With discussions already underway with various unnamed equipment vendors, eircom will use the trial to evaluate network construction costs and customer interest. Built as an open access network, competitors will be able to leverage the FTTH network to provide services with the option to partner on other future deployments.
"This investment underlines eircom's commitment to test new technologies at scale and will help determine the technological requirements and regulatory frameworks that are necessary across the whole country in support of the future economy for Ireland," Paul Donovan, eircom's CEO, said in a statement.
eircom's FTTH trial is just one element of an ongoing series of evaluations it has been conducting on the future of its broadband service offerings. Over the past two years, the incumbent provider not only conducted trials of both FTTH and Fiber to the Cabinet (FTTC), but also in January rolled out ADSL2+ with 24 Mbps capabilities to 500,000 customers.
For more:
- see the release here
- TeleGeography has this article
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