Eircom to connect one million Irish homes with fibre by end-2014

Irish telco Eircom has confirmed the next phase of its fibre network rollout, which is expected to start delivering services to end-users in the first half of 2013.

Describing it as Ireland’s biggest such project, Eircom CEO Herb Hribar said: “We remain fully committed to our investment strategy in high speed broadband across both our fixed and mobile platforms.

“Together with the rollout of our recently purchased 4G spectrum, we will offer broadband speeds of up to 70Mbps to our customers by next summer.”

Phase IV of its fibre rollout involves all 26 counties of Ireland and is expected to be completed in December 2014, when it will reach a total of one million premises.

So far, the project has brought fibre broadband within reach of 150,000 premises, although they have to wait until next year before they can start receiving fibre-enabled services, which will be available both from Eircom and other operators.

The telco had reached 459,000 broadband customers by the end of the third quarter of this year, after losing 2,000 customers in the three-month period, with declines also showing in its quarterly revenues and profits.

CFO Richard Moat commented that the company must “aggressively” address costs as well as offer new high-speed broadband bundles and data offerings in 2013 in order to secure the company’s future in the medium term.