Business

It's a shoe-in for Seamus as shop becomes BT's 300,000th fibre broadband customer

Seamus Morgan from SM Shoes, the 300,000th customer to sign up to super-fast broadband in the north, with Katrina O’Mahony, BT's wholesale sales manager
Seamus Morgan from SM Shoes, the 300,000th customer to sign up to super-fast broadband in the north, with Katrina O’Mahony, BT's wholesale sales manager Seamus Morgan from SM Shoes, the 300,000th customer to sign up to super-fast broadband in the north, with Katrina O’Mahony, BT's wholesale sales manager

SHOE shop owner Seamus Morgan from Rathfriland has become the 300,000th customer to get connected to BT's open access fibre network and enjoyi the benefits of high speed internet access.

And Seamus, who owns SM Shoes, says having super-fast broadband, enabling him to receive download speeds of up to 80 megabites and upload speeds of 20Mbps, is "vital" in ensuring the continued growth of his business, especially given its rural location.

"The vast majority of our business has now moved online but this would not have been possible without our efforts on social media – all of which is enabled by super-fast fibre broadband," he said.

"We now have a member of staff dedicated to the website and social media, uploading product photographs and managing social media feeds, like Snapchat and Instagram.

"We have worked hard to develop a community of over 30,000 followers on Facebook and regularly run special offers which we want to share with our customers across Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the rest of the UK in real time. With super-fast we’ve really gone up a gear and it’s made a huge difference.”

More than a third (35 per cent) of homes and business in Northern Ireland are currently connected to fibre broadband.

Garret Kavanagh, acting managing director of NI Networks at BT, said: “We’re delighted to have reached this important milestone, enabling even more homes and businesses to avail of improved broadband speeds.

"In some cases, we’ve been able to take customers from speeds of less than 2Mbps up to 330Mbps which makes a phenomenal difference to the end user.

“As Mr Morgan’s experience proves, there are huge benefits to be gained by adopting the technology and I would encourage everyone to check if they can avail of the service, which can easily be done by logging on to www.nibroadband.com.”

In addition to its current joint broadband programmes with the Northern Ireland government, BT recently announced a £20 million investment in a major expansion of ultra-fast broadband to towns across the north.

This will predominantly involve the deployment of fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology, capable of providing broadband speeds of up to 1Gbps. Roll-out of this latest phase of the network will begin immediately and run until March 2019.