The contract to build the national fiber broadband network was awarded by the Fine Gael Government of 2016-2020, with the contract to build the network signed on November 19th, 2019.
I mention this because, yesterday afternoon, I was perusing the national broadband Ireland website which keeps potential customers of the state’s national broadband scheme appraised of when they might finally be connected to that network. In our case, it will be February 2026. Which means that it will have taken the Irish state just shy of seven years from signing a multi-billion-euro contract to actually delivering the service to this part of Tipperary.
The cost of this network, at the time the contract was signed, was put at around 3 billion euros. 2.97 billion to be precise, or about 30million shy of 3 billion. In return, the state will get every home in the country which does not have fiber broadband connected, with minimum download speeds of 500 megabytes per second.
That is, to be sure, good and fast internet. When it finally gets to our house, we might well sign up.
In the meantime, however, we got ourselves connected last year via Elon Musk’s Starlink. It did not cost 3 billion quid.
That is not to say that it was cheap: The kit, which we bought a few months ago in Currys in Limerick, was about 200 quid. I paid a company that installs Sky TV and other roof-mounted kits a further 200 or so to install the equipment properly. The Starlink contract is month-to-month with no commitment, but it is €50 per month. In return, at 1.44pm on a random Wednesday afternoon, these are the speeds we are getting. They are often much better than this – but this is sort of the baseline.
Now, obviously, the national broadband plan promises us better than that. But that misses the point: The speeds above are more than enough for me to run a national media business from rural Co. Tipperary. The latency is fast enough for me to upload live streamed video from my office, if I wished to. The download speeds allow us to do pretty much anything you might think to use the internet for as a relatively normal household, whether it be streaming TV shows or online gaming, or anything else. I am at no real disadvantage here compared to somebody with access to high-speed fiber.
The national broadband plan says that it will deliver broadband to 564,000 premises across Ireland. For the sake of argument, assuming new homes have been built in the interim, we will round that number up to 600,000 premises. The cost of this is to the state is projected at 2.97 billion quid, and it has taken and will take the guts of a decade.
This works out at a cost per premises of about €4500. By contrast, the total cost to us of installing Starlink was no more than €450. Literally ten times cheaper, and delivered much faster. And by the way, though we installed Starlink here a few months ago, we just waited far longer than we needed to: We could have installed it two years ago.
Here’s the kicker: If the state had just given every home in the so-called intervention area a grant of €500 to buy and install Starlink, the cost to the state would have been €300million. Or about 10% of what the taxpayer is actually spending for a product that takes far longer to roll out at vastly higher cost.
There’s more: Since Starlink and other low-earth orbit (LEO) Satellite broadband systems are still in their relative infancy compared to terrestrial fiber systems, it is almost a cinch that they will, over time, get faster and better and cheaper than they are today. You don’t need to be visionary to see this, you simply need to look at the evolution of technology over time: Thirty years ago a dial-up connection was the standard, delivering a few hundred bytes per second. Today, fiber delivers up to 500mbps. If LEO technology advances at even a fraction of that rate, then my connection here is only going to get faster and faster.
To some extent it is hard to blame politicians completely for this: In 2019, when that contract was signed, the widespread availability and speed of LEO internet was something that many people foresaw, but few could be absolutely certain about. Doubts about latency and other issues persisted, and had to be set against the certainty that fiber could be delivered, albeit on a long timeframe and at higher cost. At the time, in fact, I remember being absolutely in favour of the broadband contract, so it would be ridiculous of me to do an “I told you so” now. I absolutely did not tell them so.
That said, this thing is at real risk of turning into an expensive and utterly irrelevant boondoggle. At the time it was signed, there were a good number of people who had the foresight to say so.
I was not amongst them. Neither were the politicians. There are lessons there for future politicians, and know-it-all columnists alike.