There seems to be more announcements on broadband these days than my internet connection can carry.

Last Thursday, ESB and Vodafone christened their joint venture Siro, putting a name on the €450m network they are building to link Ireland’s main cities and towns. The company was formed last year and aims to use ESB’s existing poles and ducts to lay fibre optics across the country – a technology that transports data through light impulsion much faster than existing copper wires. It will compete with Eircom, which started rolling out its own fibre network two years ago and showcased its capabilities in Co Mayo last week.

Siro aims to roll out its network to 50 towns by the end of 2018, while Eircom is on course to have fibre down in 66 towns by the end of 2017. Many of Eircom’s cabinets – the boxes that sit on street corners and host connections to neighbouring homes and businesses – are already connected to fibre, boosting broadband speed locally.

This, however, is no good to us in rural areas, because speed decreases with distance from the cabinet on existing copper wires and the service tends to fade out completely after three miles.

Both companies will offer customers in towns and cities the option to pay a premium to have the fibre extended to their doorstep and get a faster service. Siro’s chief executive Sean Atkinson said at a test site for this higher-end option in Cavan last month, that “businesses in Cavan town will be on the same playing field as the most cutting-edge cities in the world, providing a vital boost for the local economy”.

Both Siro and Eircom have also committed to making their fibre network open-access, which means that other companies will be able to rent lines at wholesale prices and compete to offer packages to final customers – that is, you and me.

Commercial roll-out

But their roll-out plans will only cover 70% of Ireland’s homes and businesses, leaving my house and hundreds of thousands of other rural addresses out of reach. Under the National Broadband Plan, the Government has said it would fill the gap and fund the roll-out of the new network to rural areas, where commercial companies refuse to go because of insufficient profitability.

Last week, Minister for Communications Alex White expressed “certainty that this Government will nail this issue of access to broadband in rural areas” through State intervention.

“In all places where the commercial sector doesn’t go, there is market failure and the state has a role to play,” he added.

Minister White said he would go to tender for an operator later this year. Construction is expected to start at the end of 2016 and “the last house will be reached by 2020”, he promised. But first, the Government must defend its case for State aid before the European Commission and get permission to subsidise the service. Although all sides are keeping their cards close to their chests, this is expected to cost up to €2bn – funded in equal parts by the operator and the taxpayer. Eircom estimates that connecting some of the most remote homes will cost more than €10,000 each.

“The Government is going to step in and link the fibre to the crossroads in the countryside,” said Eamonn Wallace of the campaign group Ireland Offline.

“Then it’s a matter of going to each house, and they are still haggling about it with the operators,” he added.

Promise of broadband to rural users

While the current universal service obligation covers only phone lines, Eircom’s director of corporate affairs Paul Bradley remarked that the tendering process would extend this to internet access.

“The National Broadband Plan creates a de facto obligation for broadband,” he said.

We should hope the Government will include strong provisions for network maintenance and access for new customers.

While bidders for the National Broadband Plan must commit to delivering speeds of at least 30MB nationwide, both Eircom and Siro have said they would roll-out the fastest option to rural customers if they won the tender.

“When Eircom looks at the tender requirements, it looks cheaper to deliver fibre to the home at 1GB (1,000MB),” Eircom’s Paul Bradley told me.

If this happens, each house in the countryside would get the fastest broadband available in cities at subsidised prices. The speed of my existing 7MB connection could be multiplied by 140.

Ireland Offline’s Eamonn Wallace said: “Our old message has been doomy and gloomy, but there is now scope for rural dwellers to get good broadband. The question is, will we deliver it? The goal should be fibre to every house.”

What about new connections and faults?

Last week, I mentioned the hefty penalties paid by Eircom last year after it failed to reach the performance criteria set by its subsidised Universal Service Obligation (USO). The company’s fined jumped from €80,000 in 2013 to €2.5m last year. The storms that battered Ireland last winter, disconnected thousands of customers and Eircom wasn’t able to respond in-line with its contract. Instead of an allowable maximum of 12.8 faults per 100 lines per year, 16.4 occurred and the company broke all its targets for maximum repair times.

The contractual fine could have run into tens of millions, but Eircom and the regulatory agency ComReg argued whether the weather constituted force majeure and finally settled the dispute out of court for €2.5m and a series of refunds to affected customers.

Yet even without the bad weather, another indicator alone would have multiplied Eircom’s USO penalties several times over – the company failed to connect new customers at premises with existing phone lines within agreed times.

This illustrates the need to include strict rules on the management of the future network in the National Broadband Plan’s tendering process: as my experience proved in last week’s Country Living, having functioning infrastructure in place alone does not guarantee that the operator chosen to run it with the support of taxpayers’ money in less profitable rural areas will actually put in the effort to make it work for everyone.