How is the National Broadband Plan being rolled out?
NBI is rolling out the largest infrastructural project in rural Ireland since rural electrification, stretching across 96% of Ireland’s land mass. It will bring high-speed broadband to 23% of Ireland’s population (including 69% of the country’s farms) over a seven-year period. NBI will be responsible for the management and maintenance of the NBI™ network for the next 25 years.
It is anticipated that the NBI™ network will require approximately 146,000km of fibre cable, 15,000km of underground duct networks and over 1.5 million poles. Where possible, overhead lines and existing poles will be used to carry the fibre cables.
The network build is divided up into 227 Deployment Areas. Each of these Deployment Areas is centred around a regional or local exchange. These exchanges house all of our technology, and provide high-speed connectivity to data centre locations.
We’ve started the rollout in the 33 Deployment Areas across Ireland that have a regional exchange. This is because regional exchanges already have an established connection back to the main data centres, which is necessary for a live network. Regional exchanges are mostly located in urban areas, and once they are built, we then extend the network build out to Deployment Areas that have a local exchange.
NBI’s construction and design partners include Entegro, KN Group, Secto, Indigo, TLI and Actavo. NBI is also working with infrastructure owners such as openeir and enet.
