BT rolls out 330Mbps fibre broadband in Northern Ireland

3 Feb 2015

Frank McManus, head of wholesale sales and services at BT Ireland and Julie Massey, fibre planner with BT Ireland

Telecoms services company BT has deployed its first fibre-to-the-premises broadband connection to Northern Ireland with resulting download speeds of 330Mbps.

Northern Ireland has one of the densest broadband networks in Europe and 90pc of premises in the region are connected to a fibre cabinet.

More than 27 internet service providers are able to access the network and sell their services.

By replacing a section of the copper network between a home and a fibre cabinet with high-speed fibre-optic cable the resulting download speed of up to 330Mbps can be achieved as well as an upload speed of 40Mbps.

A feature-length movie of 850Mbps in size could be downloaded in just 20 seconds over 330Mbps.

“At BT we are always innovating, and continuously trying to raise the bar on what we’ve done before,” said Frank McManus, head of wholesale sales and services at BT Ireland.

“We brought fixed-line broadband to Northern Ireland, we then embarked on making it faster through fibre-to-cabinet technology and now we are proactively building on that by connecting customers with fibre to the premise in a number of locations within the Northern Ireland improvement project.

“It’s an exciting development for Northern Ireland and the results speak for themselves,” McManus added.

Yesterday, BT revealed plans to provide fibre speeds of between 500Mbps and 1Gbps across the UK after trialling a new ‘G.fast’ technology in Newcastle and Cambridgeshire during the summer.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com