Here are some of the latest news feeds about broadband in Northern Ireland.

 

Northern Ireland to have "best broadband in Europe"

Northern Ireland will have the best fibre broadband network in Europe by mid 2011, according to a Government minister. The country is midway through a £48 million BT fibre broadband rollout, which was part-funded by the EU. The deployment will give 95% of Northern Irish businesses access to a connection of at least 5Mbits/sec by the Summer.

"Britain aims to have the best superfast broadband by 2015," said Arlene Foster, minister for enterprise and trade at a press conference at BT's headquarters in Belfast. "We should get there before anyone else."

The Northern Ireland Assembly secured £18 million of EU funding for its fibre rollout, £12 million of which was designated for improving the internet speeds in rural areas, some of which were still dawdling on dial-up connections.

"We focused on rural areas - the money was skewed heavily in that direction," Foster claimed. "Few, if any parts of the UK, will have that much fibre in rural areas."

Foster claimed the fibre network will help Northern Ireland attract new types of business, as well as provide much-needed connectivity for existing businesses.

"100% access to broadband is a very powerful selling point for us," she said. "All sectors rely on connectivity."

"It does free up people to live in rural areas," she added. "They don't have to go to London, they don't have to go to New York."

The public/private investment in Northern Ireland echoes a similar BT project in Cornwall, where £53.5 million of EU money will help deliver fibre to 90% of the county by 2014. BT is contributing £78.5 million to the Cornwall project, which is coming out of the £2.5 billion it has set aside for Britain's fibre rollout.

Read more: Northern Ireland to have "best broadband in Europe" | Broadband | News | PC Pro

 

 

BT skipping up to 60% of cabinets in fibre rollout

The installation lottery of BT’s fibre rollout is leaving thousands of homes in blackspots even though their areas are supposedly enabled for fibre broadband. According to industry insiders, as many 60% of street-level cabinets have been left out of the fibre loop during the initial installation, despite BT trumpeting the availability of services in the area.

BT’s fibre rollout is the long-hoped-for upgrade that moves the UK towards next-generation internet access, but the technology requires two installations to be completed - one at the exchange and the other at the street cabinet - before consumers can receive up to 40Mbits/sec services.

“A highly visible list of schedules goes out to say when exchanges are going to be enabled, but that only means the exchange area is starting to be ‘in progress’,” said Stuart Watson, broadband product manager at Zen Internet, which resells BT's fibre service.

“BT Openreach describes an exchange as in progress if there are ten cabinets live, but there could be 70 or 80 or more cabinets in that area – customers are seeing when their exchange is enabled but not when their cabinet is going to be, or even if it’s going to be upgraded, because only about 40% or 50% of cabinets in a given area are scheduled or are likely to be upgraded.

“BT needs to make it clearer what an enabled exchange means, make clear that a rollout can take place over three, four or five months and make clear that just because an exchange is enabled the actually coverage in that area could be 40% or 50%.”

BT's response

BT disputes the scale of the problem, and said some cabinets not upgraded during the initial installation might be “revisited later”.

“We aim for as much coverage as possible within our technical and commercial parameters," a BT spokesperson told PC Pro. "On average the figure is around 85% of an exchange area - this may be higher or much lower depending on the infrastructure and the market."

BT added there are only a handful of exchanges with between 40-50% of cabinets enabled, and that in many of these cases this equates to actual coverage of "up to 70% of homes and businesses in an exchange area".

"In the rollout overall, on average well over 70% of cabinets are enabled within each exchange area, covering, around 85% of homes and businesses," the spokesperson added.

BT says technical factors, as well as return on investment, are taken into account when deciding which cabinet to upgrade. "A range of commercial and technical criteria is used to decide whether a specific cabinet is enabled. If a specific cabinet does not support enough premises it may not be enabled for fibre at this time,” the spokesperson said.

 

Derry to Get 100% Fibre Connectivity

As part of their sponsorship of the UK City of Culture, BT have committed to connecting 100% of cabinets in the Derry area to fibre broadband, making the city (as far as anyone knows) the only city in the UK or Ireland to have 100% availability - including some 20,000+ homes and 6000+ businesses.

The works will start immediately and should be completed in the latter half of this year. Moreover, as the infrastructure will be neutral, this move should help foster even greater competition in the local marketplace.

 

Northern Ireland's next generation broadband

Stormont is ahead of the game in delivering next generation broadband across Northern Ireland thanks to an innovative partnership with BT, explains enterprise minister Arlene Foster. Matthew D'Arcy reports

Arlene Foster has big plans for broadband in Northern Ireland. As enterprise minister, she says connectivity is vital for boosting businesses based throughout the province and crucial for attracting foreign investment.

Northern Ireland has become known as a pioneer for broadband having had 100 per cent broadband connectivity for a number of years, placing the region ahead of the rest of the UK and many nations throughout the world.

But it isn't willing to rest there. Just as the coalition government in Westminster started to address the problem of superfast broadband by promising the best network in Europe by 2015, the Stormont Executive had already been working to deliver faster speeds through fibre-based technology for months, with the intention of giving Northern Ireland businesses a connectivity edge much sooner.

"Whatever the targets are, it is important that we are ahead of the game, because of our peripherality in Europe," Foster tells Publicservice.co.uk.

And ahead of the game Northern Ireland certainly is. Working with BT, the government started to deliver next generation broadband on a wide scale to Northern Ireland businesses in December 2009. By late 2010, BT was halfway through a project rollout that aims to benefit 85 per cent of Northern Ireland's businesses.

Sitting in the BT Riverside Tower in Belfast, Foster says it's "just tremendous" that this target will now be surpassed, with 95 per cent of businesses set to have faster broadband by May of 2011. She says: "Our next generation broadband is aiming to get there before anybody else. We believe that will really help the Northern Ireland economy. We are very much an SME economy and therefore we need people to be connected."

Significantly this improved connectivity will apply beyond built up areas like Belfast, extending a fibre reach to remote and rural locations across Northern Ireland. As the industry partner, BT is installing fibre optic cable throughout urban districts, towns, villages and countryside, upgrading equipment across 166 exchange areas, benefiting a total of 29,000 businesses.

One business, based in the rural town of Newcastle, some 30 miles south of Belfast, is very positive about benefiting from a faster connection. Paul Sherry, of Energy Assessments Northern Ireland, says his business wouldn't have been able to set up in Newcastle a few years ago. Now the company which set up in 2008, say they are at no disadvantage to Belfast-based businesses. Benefiting from 39Mbps download speeds and 8Mbps upload speeds, the company says the infrastructure is why it can count Swindon Borough Council amongst its clients.

JR Annett, a countryside based picture and framing company is also benefiting from improved connectivity. Owner John Paul Annett says fibre based broadband saves him thousands of pounds as he is able to enhance his online point of sale. Annett explains that he is now far less reliant on distributing catalogues, which have cost his business around £1,000 every month, as well as losing him trade from consumers who are impatient to wait for catalogues to arrive in the post. Instead, he is now able to upload high quality images of the products he sells to his web portal.

BT, who Foster says has worked "very well" with the Northern Ireland government, say they would never have ventured down the route of delivering fibre broadband to such remote businesses on commercial grounds alone.

Under the partnership, a mixture of private and public funding is allowing infrastructure to be deployed. Northern Ireland government departments have invested £18m into the £48m project after securing funding from the European Regional Development Fund. BT invested the remaining £30m.

The result is clearly proving beneficial for Northern Ireland business. By May 2011, Foster says that over 25 per cent of rural businesses will have 5Mbps or better and in urban areas she expects more than half of businesses to have access to 15Mbps or better.

And it's not just internal connectivity within the region that will benefit the economy. Foster says international connectivity is also making a positive impact. She tells Publicservice.co.uk: "The profile we have built up in relation to telecoms in Northern Ireland, whether its internal connectivity, or international connectivity with Project Kelvin, is a very strong selling point when I speak to American and Indian companies."

Project Kelvin, completed in November 2010 gave Northern Ireland a direct telecoms link to North America, which Foster at the time said "provides increased opportunities to sell goods and services overseas".

Aside from economic and business benefits of next generation broadband, consumers in Northern Ireland are also benefiting from the improved infrastructure being delivered. Although, business has been the main drive in achieving better broadband, the general public are able to piggyback from increased speeds in their area.

Bob Jordan, 83, uses the internet for "everything". He says: "All my travel I book on the internet. I purchase online, I buy things I don't need. I use it for making Birthday cards, anniversary cards, [sending] photographs. I get a lot of fun out of that." He explains he uses his upgraded broadband connection to check his premium bonds and to do his online banking. He says: "If the computer goes down for a day, I'm in trouble."

Jordan even uses the internet to do his income tax online and has attempted with limited success to access some council services.

Accessing public services online is becoming increasingly important in the UK, with government departments looking to save money through far less costly online public interactions. Through NI Direct, Northern Ireland has been driving forward online public services, changing the way they are presented to members of the public like Bob Jordan. Foster explains: "NI Direct is a big part of government's push to get people online in terms of their interaction with government."

Although she says her colleagues in the finance department clearly recognise the cost benefits of online services, Foster says the benefit for her is that NI Direct is widening access across the region, allowing SMEs to use government services without the need to travel to Belfast. She also tells Publicservice.co.uk that at one time, the government considered moving departments around the region. But with the availability of a strong broadband infrastructure, she suggests this not the way to go. She says: "I strongly feel the way to go is to have services online so that physical [government] buildings don't have to move."

In a world where online access is more important every day, Foster concludes that investment in broadband has been vital. The innovative nature of funding has given Northern Ireland an opportunity to develop broadband for what Foster describes as the most rurally dispersed of any region in the UK. She says: "What the next generation programme has allowed us to do is very important." But though Northern Ireland is ahead in many respects, it remains clear that the Executive's efforts in this area are far from over. "I think we can deliver more."