Fibre rollout in South East running into issues with Eir
Cllrs (l-r)Pat Dunphy, Fidelis Doherty, Ger Frisby, Eamon Aylward & Tomás Breathnach at Piltown Municipal meeting, May 1, 2024
Fibre Broadband is being rolled out across South East region as part of the National Broadband Plan (NBP).
At the Piltown Municipal meeting, Rita McGarvey of Kilkenny County Council went through the report on the current progress of the rollout.
She said: “To set the context, there are a number of exchanges across the county; there are regional exchanges and local exchanges.
"Regional exchanges are based in Kilkenny City, Waterford, Carrick-on-Suir. The closest for this area is Carrick-on-Suir and Waterford."
The report showed small areas around Mooncoin, Piltown and Kilmacow that had poor broadband and are outside of the NBP:
"The only statement that has been made by Open Eir is that there will be fibre available in these areas by the end of the NBP in 2026/ 2027 via their IFN (Ireland's Fibre network) scheme."'
However, issues with internet provider Eir, came to the forefront at the meeting.
Councillor Pat Dunphy (Fine Gael) asked: “Maybe we could do for a contact with Eir” in regards to Mooncoin residents who may be struggling to gain fibre broadband.
Councillor Tomás Breathnach (Labour) urged the necessity of every household having the same standard in quality: “It would be great of everybody has the same standard of fibre broadband, that’s what our job as Council, is to do whatever we can to achieve it.”
Cathaoirleach Ger Frisby (Fianna Fáil) asked: “What kind of relationship do we have with Eir?
“A lot of this area is in the area of their rollout. There’s a place right here on the top of the Belmont Road, I’ve raised this before, I can’t seem to get any answers."
When told that there is a contact number for Eir, he replied: “Yes, but that’s useless. Do we have any power over them?”
Director of Services for Kilkenny County Council Sean McKeown said: “Unfortunately no, they’re not a semi-state in the same way we can ask an IDA or Enterprise Ireland.”
In recent weeks, the Eir company has garnered criticism over their handling of customer care complaints and logging of incidents.
Cllr Frisby continued: “You heard all the complaints about Eir and their whole attitude towards customers, which is disgraceful. There just doesn’t seem to be anyway to hold them to account and surely as a Council I though we would have some kind of working relationship to say ‘Listen, there’s an anomaly here.’
”We have no correspondence with them, so you can imagine why people are so frustrated."
