Huawei revealed on Wednesday that it has been awarded a €10 million contract to supply Eircom with equipment for its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network.
The Irish incumbent will immediately begin deploying the Chinese vendor’s optical line terminals (OLTs) and optical network terminals (ONTs) in the 16 communities where construction has already commenced. These include major cities, regional centres and every county town in Ireland.
Eircom aims to offer 1 Gbps broadband services in these locations from the end of August. In tot al, 66 communities will be covered by its upgraded network by 2017.
"This is another important milestone in the journey to bring high speed broadband to Ireland," said Johnny Shine, group managing director, Eircom Networks, in a statement.
"Huawei is happy to be playing its part in bringing superfast broadband speeds to these communities and we look forward to working with Eircom to deliver on this exciting programme," added Jeff Wang, president of Huawei’s access network product line.
Eircom’s national fibre network – a mix of FTTH and fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology – went live in May 2013, offering speeds of up to 70 Mbps. Since then, the telco has steadily increased the peak throughput to 100 Mbps, using vectoring technology to reach these higher speeds on its FTTC network.
In October 2014, Eircom announced plans to offer 1 Gbps broadband to customers covered by its FTTH network.
"We see customer demand for data continue to grow at a rapid pace. By deploying FTTH technology we will be in a position to meet and exceed those growing data demands and expectations with a suite of products that offers truly world class broadband speeds," Shine said on Wednesday.
