“Enterprise Minister Arlene Foster has reinforced her commitment to improving broadband services in rural areas with completion of another project through the competitive £1.9million Northern Ireland Broadband Fund.”
The Broadband fund is co-financed under the European Regional Development Fund Sustainable Competitiveness Programme. It aims to increase the delivery of broadband in rural areas.
The Fund supports trials demonstrating technologies that can be used to deliver higher speed, next generation broadband services; and projects which offer solutions for provision of commercial services in priority rural areas in Northern Ireland.
Arlene Foster has also welcomed further encouraging news that North West Electronics is to provide higher speed broadband services in rural areas.
She added: “The company has recently contracted with Hibernia Atlantic to purchase bandwidth on the Project Kelvin network. Using the support provided by my Department under the Broadband Fund, the company has also installed a number of higher speed broadband links on this part of its network.”
“As a consequence, it can now offer higher specification services and has decided to increase its base service from 2Mbps to 5Mbps at no additional cost to customers. Access to next generation broadband services is now a reality for some of the most rural parts of Northern Ireland.”
“Our key objective is to continue to encourage the emergence of affordable, high speed broadband services in such areas, providing conditions for the growth of local enterprises. This is a significant step in that direction.”