The lightning-fast connection will be brought to tribesmen across the county thanks to the SIRO infrastructure.
As the all too elusive sun starts to poke its head out from behind the clouds for our 15 minutes of summer, there are few places in the country better to spend it than Galway.
And today there was some more good news for the residents who are living there as it was announced that they’d be the latest region to benefit from the next big roll-out of SIRO, the country's fastest broadband infrastructure.
Minister of State for the Irish Language, the Gaeltacht and the Islands, Seán Kyne, was on hand to announce the investment in Galway City as the first homes in the county were connected to the network in Oranmore.
What is SIRO?
SIRO is a joint venture between the ESB and Vodafone which is building a 100% fibre-optic, fibre-to-the-building (FTTB) broadband infrastructure around Ireland.
FTTB is often called pure fibre as it doesn't suffer from the slower speeds and degradation of signal that fibre-to-the-cabinet broadband, which relies also on old copper cables, suffers from.
You can read more about SIRO here.
The juicy details
The Galway rollout will see broadband powered by SIRO made available to approximately 30,000 premises across Galway City and the surrounding area. SIRO will invest €20 million in the construction of its gigabit (1,000Mb) broadband network, representing what will be the largest single investment that SIRO will make in 2019.
The network build will commence from SIRO points of interconnect in Galway, Oranmore and Moneenageisha to cover 30 clusters in the Galway area.
One gigabit per second is over 15 times faster than the average broadband speed available in Ireland. For context, downloading a film of 4GB in size with a 10Mb connection takes an hour - with SIRO it takes 30 seconds.
Minister welcomes announcement
Welcoming the announcement, Minister Seán Kyne said: “Gigabit connectivity will have a transformative effect on Galway as fibre-to-the-building is recognised as the gold standard for broadband internationally."
“As a result, this will give Galway businesses a head start against their peers both at home and internationally, as well as giving homes access to the latest digital services.”
John Keaney, CEO of SIRO, added: “Our gigabit connectivity will complement Galway’s rich technology heritage and put it on a par with international cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo in terms of broadband quality."
“SIRO is proud to help power a digital transformation in the city benefiting residents and businesses alike by introducing a new fibre era and switching off the old legacy copper network.”
More retailers on board
Ten retailers now offer services powered by SIRO’s gigabit broadband network to homes and businesses in 45 towns across the country. They are: Vodafone, Digiweb, Sky, BT, Carnsore Broadband, Rocket Broadband, Kerry Broadband, eNet, Airwire and WestNet – with more retailers expected to come on board as the company drives competition in the wholesale broadband market.
SIRO is offered on an open-access basis to all telecoms retailers in Ireland.
You can check out all of the SIRO offerings and all the other broadband offerings in your area right here on bonkers.ie.
