We all have a particular interest in the arrival of high speed broadband in Dingle with the Internet connection crawling along at snail’s pace. My interest is so great that I am considering working through the night and taking days off so that work can get done in a reasonable manner.
We know that there will be no improvements in the situation before the summer and indeed it will only become slower as we and our visitors add more Internet connected devices to our range of paraphernalia.
Sometimes, information can be the key to peace of mind, because when you know something is going to come to an end it is much easier to carry on without making any dramatic changes in work practices. So, I asked a question of our local representative Brenda Griffin regarding the keenly anticipated arrival of high speed broadband in Dingle and the surrounding areas. Fair play to him, he passed it on to the relevant Minister and according to Alex White, ” The National Broadband Plan aims to ensure that every citizen and business, regardless of location, has access to a high quality, high speed broadband service. This will be achieved through a combination of commercial investments and a State led intervention in areas where commercial services will not be provided.”
So part of this area of Kerry will be covered by the commercial companies and the other part of the area will be covered by an extension of the National Broadband Scheme, called the National Broadband plan. The department are providing a map www.broadband.gov.ie. with areas marked in Blue and Amber, those marked BLUE represent those areas that will have access to commercial high speed broadband services by end 2016. Dingle is included in this category.
The connection of the areas marked amber on the map is a work in progress, a company to provide this scheme will be selected by the end of the year and then they can start working on the infrastructure, the length of time is undetermined, but The National Broadband Plan aims to ensure that every citizen and business, regardless of location, has access to a high quality, high speed broadband service. the Government anticipate that the first homes and businesses will be connected in 2016 and connections will continue thereafter, with the intention of having all premises connected within a 5 year period.
Eircom are the commercial company who will be providing high speed broadband infrastructure to Dingle and according to their engineers “The forecast date remains September 2015. There are seven cabinets planned to reach approximately 1600 premises when the rollout in Dingle is complete”. So it seems for the town of Dingle the rollout is ahead of the Government’s schedule, which is good for us and possibly we will not have a repeat of what happened during October 2014 when different premises, including my own, were disconnected from the Internet because of an overload on the system. To add a small insult to injury I reported this problem to be told it was a fault on the line, and an engineer would look at it the following week. The following week I was informed that there was no fault on the line and that is had been disconnected because of an overload and all I needed to do was to turn on and off the router to reconnect. The power of information.
