Irish telco eircom has announced the locations for phase one of its fibre rollout plan, including communities in six counties across all four of the Irish Republic’s provinces, as well as major cities including Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick.

The first communities to benefit from the project include: Mervue (Galway); Douglas (Cork); Dooradoyle (Limerick); Tallaght, Ballyboden, Palmerstown, Swords, Donabate (County Dublin); Clonee (County Meath); and Letterkenny (County Donegal).

These are in addition to the four pilot areas previously announced – Wexford Town in County Wexford and Sandyford Village, Priory Park and Dundrum in County Dublin.

Work on the first phase of the project is expected to start this autumn and continue through the summer of 2012, using investments of €100m and based mainly on Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology, with Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) to be used in certain areas. Once phase one is completed, more than 100,000 homes and businesses within the selected areas will have access to speeds of 40Mbps and above.

“This is the next step in the rollout of high speed broadband services,” said Paul Donovan, CEO of eircom Group. “We have selected locations which have a geographical reach beyond Dublin and across the country. We believe there is a strong appetite for new fibre based products and services that will be competitively priced. Work will commence later this year and we hope to have the network upgrade completed by the end of summer 2012.”

eircom intends to launch a range of new entertainment services over fibre next year, including IPTV (both live and on-demand), catch-up TV, and social media delivered to the TV, as well as make the new network available on a wholesale basis to other ISPs.