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Kerry Blackspots

You’re gonna need more SIMs Deputy Michael Cahill has been asking questions in the Dáil about Kerry mobile coverage; quite a few. Since May 2025 he has asked at least 30. As he’s often quite specific about the roads and areas so we’ve put them on a map. The answers he gets are standard Departmental stuff; a disclaimer, a fragrant history of the last spectrum auction, and some helpful-unhelpful advice about escalation. Occasionally it’s a little combative. Last year on the 25th of January the Department contradicted deputy Cahill’s account of poor coverage in Dromod because ComReg’s model said otherwise,...

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Loughglinn premises on its own.

The envy of the village ComReg’s latest batch of area broadband statistics has just been published, and among the “Small Areas” tier is Loughglinn, where there exists one house – in a village full of obsolete copper – that has managed to secure fibre-to-the-home under the NBP. Meanwhile the rest of the village remains in limbo and will have to make do.

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Eircom’s FTTH rollout slows

Today’s quarterly presentation from Eircom contains more disappointment on FTTP progress. Only 24k premises were passed in Q2 2026 which is about half the rate it was achieving in 2023. As the weather was fairly benign it has to be assumed that this is the trend for the future. On the basis of last 12-month figure (129k) Eircom is unlikely to complete its 1.9M target before mid 2029. On the basis of last quarter’s results it could be well into 2030. We would question also whether a proportion of the quarter’s roll-out is new build or whether it refers exclusively to the...

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The GIA’s Irish Road Trip

The Plan The Gigabit Infrastructure Act is the EU’s latest attempt to get network utilities and public bodies to share their existing physical infrastructure (PI); poles, towers, ducts, cabinets etc., with telecoms networks. It does so by a presumptive right to access, a Single Information Point (SIP) – to discover the PI, and a dispute resolution body. The net objectives are to accelerate deployment of Very High Capacity Networks (VHCNs), and to reduce environmental and financial costs. It also provides for coordination of new PI developments between telecoms and other networks, and requires the SIP to act also as a portal...

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Are Virgin Media becoming irrelevant?

For many years Virgin Media provided broadband and TV services over coaxial cable and charged handsomely for the service. Admittedly the service was quite stable and probably worth the premium price being charged for the service in comparison to XDSL services (broadband over the phone line service) of that time. We’ve been contacted by a number of Virgin customers who are being charged up to 100€ for basic services whereas the norm for these services now is in the range of 30/40€ and they’ve been wondering why. With the advent of FIBRE to the home services that are becoming common...