Charleville to join the information super speed highway

CHARLEVILLE is one of the five towns in County Cork announced by SIRO to be included in the roll-out of their Gigabit broadband initiative to provide the best access to the most powerful broadband services in Ireland.

Charleville joins 40 other towns in the country in the scheme, which was launched by An Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Simon Coveney TD at a breakfast event at the Clayton Hotel in Cork on Monday. Present were representatives from the Charleville based accountancy firm of Murray Cloney and Associates to hear the good news for Charleville.

Building on the successful deployment of SIRO in the Cork towns of Carrigaline, Skibbereen and Mallow, SIRO’s Cork footprint will expand to include a further 10,000 premises in five new towns – Carrigtwohill, Midleton, Blarney, Tower and Charleville. SIRO has built a network of over 185,000 premises in 40 towns around Ireland and Cork (totalling 85,000 premises) will be the largest single SIRO investment, with the €60 million construction plans announced this week bringing the wholesale broadband operator’s total spend in the county to €70 million.

SIRO has appointed Huawei as its build partner for the Cork rollout marking the latest in a series of partnerships between the two companies. Huawei is providing end-to-end network equipment for phase one of SIRO’s rollout to 50 regional towns and is currently SIRO’s build partner in Athlone. The two companies also collaborated to run a successful trial of XGSPON technology on SIRO’s 100% fibre network, which achieved speeds of 10 Gigabits per second.

The TLI Group, which has already worked with SIRO on its Carrigaline rollout, has also been appointed to deliver Gigabit connectivity to five new towns. Carrigtwohill, Midleton, Blarney, Tower and Charleville will now also gain access to SIRO’s Fibre-to-the-Building technology, which is recognised as the gold standard for broadband connectivity internationally and is 100% fibre-optic, with no copper at any point to slow it down.

SIRO is a joint venture of ESB and Vodafone, which is investing €450 million in building Ireland’s first 100% Fibre-to-the-Building broadband network. Using the existing ESB network, SIRO delivers fibre optic cables all the way to the building, delivering one gigabit speeds. For context, downloading a high definition (HD) film of 4 GB (Gigabytes) with a 10 Mbps connection takes an hour – with SIRO it takes 30 seconds.