THREE more towns in the north - Newcastle, Portrush and Portstewart - will become full fibre enabled in the next year and a half.
The seaside destinations will join more than two dozen other locations in Northern Ireland where Openreach have introduced new future-proof fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) broadband technology.
It comes a year after the engineering team that builds, maintains and manages the broadband network in the region was renamed as Openreach.
Some 103 locations across the UK have now been included in Openreach’s multi-billion pound ‘fibre first’ programme, and the company is making the technology available to 20,000 homes and businesses every week, keeping it on track to reach four million premises by the end of March 2021.
There are currently 205,000 full fibre enabled premises in Northern Ireland, an increase of 156,000 in the last year, and Openreach says it will have half of all premises in the region fully enabled the March 2021 deadline
Mairead Meyer, director of Openreach in Northern Ireland, said: “Since the launch of our fibre first build programme last year, we’ve made huge progress here, building a network that delivers more than just speed.
“Full-fibre broadband provides a reliable, future-proof, consistent and dependable service that will be a platform for economic growth and prosperity in Northern Ireland for decades to come.
“We’re determined to build fibre as quickly as possible to ensure the region has a reliable network capable of supporting future data-hungry services and applications essential for boosting productivity, and we’ve also appointed 98 new recruits in Northern Ireland since being launched last October.”
Mairead continued: “We’re pressing ahead with our investment and Openreach engineers are now building in communities right across NI, keeping us on track to deliver against the ambitions we set out this time last year and making Northern Ireland the most fully fibre connected region in the UK.
“With that in mind, we’re thrilled that Newcastle, Portrush and Portstewart will benefit from our network.”
Since the build programme began in February last year, its engineers have deployed around 2.6 million kilometres of fibre in the UK – enough to travel to the moon and back three times.
