Virgin Media Ireland has announced a €200 million national fibre network upgrade rollout.
The firm's huge investment will mean a fibre upgrade for more than one million homes and businesses across the country.
This huge boost will enabling home broadband speeds that are 10 times faster than the current peak home speeds available of 1Gbps.
All Virgin customers will have speeds of up to 10Gbps available after the rollout which Paul Higgins, Vice President of Virgin Media Ireland told IrishMirror.ie will take three years to complete.
The firm also said that the rollout will create 500 jobs and will result in wholesale opportunities by opening up third party access to the Virgin Media network.
The broadband network to full fibre rollout will commence in early 2022.
The company has already successfully piloted a fibre upgrade of 500 premises.
This resulted in Virgin delivering speeds of up to 10Gbps (Gigabits per second), 10 times what is currently the top speed available to home users, which is 1Gbps.
The €200m fibre investment is backed by Liberty Global, Virgin Media Ireland’s parent company.
Tony Hanway, CEO of Virgin Media, enthused: “At Virgin Media we’re committed to innovating for our customers and investing in Ireland’s long-term digital future. We’re now accelerating the evolution of our network by building out full fibre to more than one million Irish homes and businesses over the next three years."
While the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications Eamon Ryan said: “I welcome the announcement by Virgin Media that it will undertake a full national fibre upgrade, which will see the further delivery of very high speed broadband to homes and businesses."
Minister Ryan added: “Continued investments by commercial operators such as this bring benefits for consumers. Together with the Government’s investment under the National Broadband Plan, this will place Ireland at the forefront of EU countries in terms of Gigabit connectivity.”
