Fibre Broadband is also referred to as ‘high-speed broadband’, ‘Gigabit broadband’ or ‘next generation broadband’. It offers much higher connection speeds, and more reliable throughput of data than previous fixed line DSL or mobile broadband. By offering a greatly improved digital experience our fibre network is perfect for home users and for businesses. High-speed fibre broadband is a future-proofed technology allowing speeds up to 2Gbps today, but five times that in the future. This future proofed technology will help Ireland to thrive, but it requires a clear strategy to connect the whole country, which is why our deployment programme when finished will enable 1.9million homes and premises. Our fibre along with that of the National Broadband Plan will give almost 100% coverage, putting Ireland ahead of or on par with other European countries. Presently within our network we have two types of fibre technology.

  • Fibre to the Home (FTTH)
  • FTTH what to expect
  • What is Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC)
Fibre to the Home (FTTH)

FTTH is the lead technology we are deploying to 1.9million homes and businesses across the island of Ireland. We completed our rural deployment program in 2016 which enabled over 340K homes and businesses in rural Ireland, all of which are in a position to connect to our full fibre network via any one of our Retail Service Providers.  

We continue to deploy fibre to homes and businesses in our urban deployment program, and in February 2023 we celebrated a major milestone of enabling over  1 million homes with our full fibre gigabit network, establishing open eir as the largest fastest growing full fibre network in Ireland. You can follow our progress on our rollout map.

Fibre to the Home (FTTH) means that a fibre line is connected directly into your home or business, it is a future proofed technology which today allows for speeds up to 2Gbps.  What does that mean for you and your customers

  • multiple devices at any time with no impact to service and speed
  • no buffering
  • once connected you can increase or decrease your customers speed requirements without the need to schedule a call out
  • voice can run over the same line, no need for the copper connection

 

Fibre to the Home (FTTH) what to expect

If your customer is presently served by FTTC or another network infrastructure then to avail of Fibre to the Home (FTTH) they will need a physical new connection into their home or business. To ensure your customers are prepared for installation and the installation can go ahead without any issues, open eir have documented some guidelines and helpful tips.

Some customers will be served overhead (pole to premises) others will be served underground via ducts.  For those customers served underground or wishing to be served underground it is important if at all possible that the existing duct on their private property is checked before installation day to ensure no blockages, it is the responsibility of the home/business owner to remove blockages in ducting that is on private property, to support your customer and to ensure they are aware of what is required we have developed

(a) a ducting document here.

(b) a video which outlines what happens if the blockages are on private or public land

(c)  a document on what to expect on installation day see here.

Once the FTTH is installed , it is critically important that your customers get the most from their fibre line, a level of  understanding of how Wi-Fi works and the difference between Wi-Fi and the physical connection is imperative, please review our Cheat Sheet here.

Relevant Links

What is Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC)

FTTC broadband means that most of the ‘local loop’ (the line from your premises to the telephone exchange) is now fibre optic cable, with the last small stretch being copper.

We initially Deployed FTTC as it allowed us to boost broadband speeds to up to 100 Megabits per second (Mb/s) for 1,600,000 million homes and businesses across Ireland within a very short time frame. We completed this body of work back in 2015.

In rolling out Fibre to the Cabinet we deployed over 9000 Km of fibre to over 7,000 fibre cabinets in communities across Ireland. We also future proofed our network – each cabinet has enough spare fibre capacity to allow us to deploy Fibre to the Home to all connected premises.

As we saw the demand for higher bandwidth increase, we started in 2016 our upgrade program to FTTH, and to date we have already enabled over 1 million homes and businesses to FTTH.

To check what service is currently available to a home or business visit our rollout map