Viatel expands into Northern Ireland with €250,000 investment

18 Aug 2017

Image: Conor McCabe Photography

Radio network provider Viatel has expanded its footprint into Northern Ireland.

While a potential hard border remains the topic of debate between the UK and Irish governments, Viatel has announced that it will expand into Northern Ireland as part of a €250,000 investment.

The 20-year-old company is one of Ireland’s largest licensed microwave radio providers and, under the new investment, it will extend its 1Gbps network to businesses in Northern Ireland, in line with the company’s ongoing strategic investment in network growth across the island.

Viatel said the new licensed microwave radio network will service all of the key city business parks and the surrounding areas, including Lisburn, Lurgan, Dunmurry, Newtownards, Holywood and Newtownabbey.

It added that the service will also connect to Viatel’s core fibre network to deliver scalable bandwidth ranging from 10Mbps to 1Gbps.

Busy few months for Viatel

Damien McCann, director of sales and marketing at Viatel, said of the news: “Viatel has made a considerable investment in our network to meet the growing demand for super-fast, secure connectivity across Ireland.

“This network will deliver true enterprise-class, fibre-like connectivity to the business in the Belfast region.”

He continued: “As Ireland’s largest licensed radio provider with nationwide coverage, we intend to expand our network footprint further into Northern Ireland so businesses, irrespective of their location, can avail of our enterprise-class 1Gbps wireless broadband, which can be deployed as a primary or backup connectivity service.”

This news follows a busy few months for Viatel after it revealed in June that it had invested €1m in the latest enterprise storage technologies to meet the demand for storage-as-a-service from businesses.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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