Fibre Broadband Ireland: Get Fibre Broadband Installed

What Types of Fibre Broadband Are FTTH and FTTC?

Fibre broadband itself can additionally be broken up into two types: FTTC, and FTTP. The primary difference between these is how the cables travel to your property, and the speeds that are delivered.

What Is FTTH Broadband?

FTTH is Fibre To The Home (also known as Fibre-To-The-Premises or FTTP) is the ideal connection type. With FTTH, the fibre cable will lead from your local exchange, directly to your home, usually in the form of underground cables. This allows for uninterrupted data transferral, resulting in optimal conditions to receive ultrafast broadband, with minimum speeds of 300 Mbps, and maximum speeds up to 1 Gbps.

The caveat of this connection type is that it is not commonly available. Typically only densely populated areas such as city centres, or properties located next to exchange hubs can avail of FTTH. This is partly due to the fact that this is still a relatively new technology, but is also due to the fact that the cable installation can be a very disruptive and difficult task, requiring the closure of roads, which necessarily is time-consuming, and very expensive. SIRO, however, is a specialist in FTTH provision, showing that there is a growing market for this form of connection.

What Is FTTC Broadband and Part-Fibre Broadband?

FTTC is Fibre To The Cabinet is much more accessible, but as such has a trade-off with speed capabilities. FTTC involves the fibre cable running from an exchange to a phone cabinet in the street, from which a copper cable runs to your home.

Though fibre optic cables help to accelerate your speed, the inclusion of copper cables dilutes internet speeds, resulting in a minimum speed of 30 Mbps, which is why this form of connection is also known as part-fibre. 30 Mbps is still a respectable speed, however, and significantly faster than ADSL, but may not be future-proof in the long term as our requirements increase.

Is SIRO the Same as Fibre?

SIRO was created as a joint venture between Vodafone and ESB. By using ESB's existing electricity network, providers who offer SIRO packages are able to provide FTTH services without having to stop in a cabinet, and often without having to undertake the lengthy fibre installation process due to "piggy-backing" on existing infrastructure.

SIRO is well suited to businesses and households with several data-heavy users, for example, if a family of four are simultaneously using their own devices to stream, download, upload or work, part-fibre and lesser internet types may struggle. With SIRO however, it is very unlikely that speed drops or lag would occur.

Required Broadband Speeds

One final thing to bear in mind is that these speeds are per person. If you have a household of multiple occupancy, and considering each person may be undertaking one or more of these tasks at any one time, you can easily see how speed requirements can easily reach into the hundreds of megabits per second.

What About 5G Broadband and Fibre Broadband?

Some properties might not be able get fibre broadband where they live. Either there are no cables that lead to your property or it is just too remote to install it. In these cases, people who want to use the internet at home can get 5G broadband which works the same way as a mobile connection except providing much greater download speeds than for your phone.

How Is Fibre Broadband Installed?

As a rule, household fibre cable installations are a relatively simple process, though they can take several days or weeks to complete between stages as surveys are analysed, and infrastructure is put into place.

1. Site Survey: An engineer must complete a site survey to establish if the site is appropriate, safe, and requires any further installations, such as a telegraph pole
2. Cable to Your Home: After the survey, a cable will be run to your home from a local fibre connection point either via overhead wires or through underground ducting. In general, this will be along the same route as your existing phone line.
3. An NTU Is Installed: A network termination unit (NTU) will be installed within your house. This is a receptacle for the main fibre cable.
4. ONT Is Installed: An optical network terminal (ONT) will also be installed in your home and connected to the NTU. This basically translates the raw fibre connection into a household-compatible form.
5. Modem Is Connected: A modem will be connected to your ONT, through which as soon as you go live you should be able to enjoy strong fibre broadband, either through WiFi, or a direct ethernet connection.

That may sound a little complicated, but it ultimately only consists of checking that everything is ok and installing the line and connections. If you have ever had a standard line installation, you will have gone through a roughly similar process.

Can I Get Fibre Where I Live?

Though through schemes such as National Broadband Ireland (NBI), fibre is becoming increasingly available to both business and domestic customers, wider coverage away from population centres can be patchy at best.

The Open Eir Network (formally Eircom) has Ireland's largest fibre network and has a handy interactive fibre broadband checker detailing where both FTTC and FTTH are available, along with their respective approximate speeds. This map is by no means conclusive, however, and in order to get an accurate answer, you will need to input your details on each service provider's website to check what is available. To do so, you may need to input the following.

1. Your Eircode
2. Your property details
3. Your landline number
4. Basic contact details such as phone and email

After completing this, your chosen provider will be able to inform you whether their local network can supply you with a fibre connection, if an installation is required, or if alternative options are more appropriate for your home.

Can't get fibre in your area? It may be worth considering mobile broadband, satellite broadband, or dongles to improve your broadband quality.

Frequently Asked Questions About fibre broadband in Ireland