Eircom’s 500,000th broadband customer will be the first person in the country to take part in the new 12Mbps (megabits per second) DSL trial to be launched later this month. Eircom claims this is the fastest residential broadband connection available in Ireland.
This 12Mbps connection will not be commercially available from next month but trialed in Sandyford, where the 500,000th customer lives.
The trial is not just contained to the Sandyford area: there will be a number of different exchanges involved that are located throughout Dublin.
A spokesperson for Eircom said that most of the people participating in this high-speed DSL trial will be internal Eircom employees.
A further 24Mbps service is also set to trial in Sandyford some time next year, and will be announced over the coming weeks.
“The fibre-to-the-home trial in Sandyford will be part of a new apartment complex that has been completely wired for this.
“With fibre to the home you have the capacity to do IPTV but you have to now also put the equipment in the exchange to make that happen,” said the spokesperson.
Separate to all of this is another IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) trial which should be taking part in a lab environment in Temple Bar before the year is out.
“In terms of IPTV there’s a lab trial that we hope to have up and running before Christmas. After Christmas we hope to roll that out to approx four exchanges in Dublin, probably south Dublin.”
This will happen when Eircom finalises agreements with content partners.
In terms of offering IPTV, Eircom says that anything over 8Mbps would make this service possible, and although it has not yet announced what customers will be first to test drive its TV model with unicast capabilities, it is not ruling out Sandyford.
By Marie Boran
