Telecommunications in Ireland - Infrastructure

Infrastructure

Ireland's telecommunications network is a modern digital system connected by an extensive national fibre optic network with multiple high capacity fibre optic links to the UK, Continental Europe, North America and with dedicated capacity on routes to Asia and other parts of the globe. There is an open and competitive telecommunications market regulated by ComReg. However, the fixed-line market is still dominated by the incumbent operator, Eircom.

Several companies operate national fibre optic networks including eircom, BT Ireland, ESB Group and UPC Ireland. Eircom's fibre network is the most extensive covering most parts of the country with 12,000km of fibre routes (>40,000km of fibres) Eircom's Next Generation Network upgrade rolled out Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) which is capable of delivering up to 320 Gb/s along a single fibre route. This upgrade also sees eircom's core infrastructure moving to an all-IP network. It has major aggregation nodes at 140 locations around Ireland and onward fibre connections to another 470 central office sites.

Ireland also has major connections to multiple international fibre optic networks, an example of which is Hibernia Atlantic.

94 Irish towns and cities also have access to publicly owned, carrier-neutral metropolitan fibre networks managed by by e|net. These networks can be used by any licensed Irish telecommunications operator to provide commercial or residential end users with products.

For residential and small business providers, most major urban areas have access to UPC Ireland's HFC network which provides speeds of up to 150mbit/s using EuroDOCSIS 3.0 cable modem technology.

Eircom wholesale is also in the process of rolling out FTTC which provides speeds of up to 70mbit/s down and 20mbit/s up. These are expected to be increased when the company deploys vectoring in the future. Retail services using this next generation access infrastructure are provided by a number of different operators.

Ireland has four mobile networks that own and operate their own network infrastructure and a number of MVNO operators that operate mobile phone services using one of these infrastructure providers' radio networks.

The four infrastructure owning networks are :

Networks providing 2G GSM and 3G UMTS. Vodafone Ireland - Wholly owned by Vodafone Group O2 Ireland - Part of Telefonica Meteor / E Mobile - Part of the eircom group

Network providing 3G UMTS only.

All four networks will launch 4G LTE services in 2013.