Irish broadband scheme could pave way for rural Yorkshire

Hear informed debate on this story in the Country Week programme from the Yorkshire Post

The multi-million pound project has seen 3,000 km of fibre optic cable laid across the country, allowing rural firms access to high speed broadband hitherto only available in cities and towns.

Conceived by the Northern Irish Government's Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, the project was established to help boost the national economy by giving the country's businesses higher rates of connection.

Working with communications giant BT it expects to provide rural firms with a minimum connection speed of 2mb per second and will be completed by May next year.

BT spent 30m on the project with a further 16.5m coming from DETI and a further 1.5m from the Department for Agriculture and Rural Development.

Arlene Foster, DETI minister, said: "One of the most important issues was to have a rural focus. We are a very rural part of the world and so we had to go in that direction.

"We recognise that farmers and agri-businesses need access to these sorts of speeds.

"We cannot just attract people on the basis that this is a nice place or that we are nice people. We need an infrastructure to drive investment."

She added that the technology was allowing the country's agricultural colleges to provide more technological training for its students, as well as making hundreds of rural firms more competitive.

Ms Foster said she would be happy to talk to anyone to in Yorkshire on what has been done.

Frank McManus, head of wholesale services with BT, said: "We are taking broadband deep into rural areas. We have gone places that we never could under a commercial basis. There is no reason why this cannot be replicated across the rest of the country."

Liv Garfield, BT's group director for strategy and policy, said firms like BT could not wholly provide the countryside with quality internet access on a purely commercial basis and that a public and private partnership was key to connecting these areas. No one model will work across the whole UK," she said. "Different places will have different community needs and different speeds."

Graham Sutherland, the chief executive of BT Ireland, agrees and said that ultimately having the will to make the project work was a key driver in the success.

One firm to benefit from fast broadband is Energy Assessments, based at in the village of Newcastle on the coast of Dundrum Bay in County Down.

Started by three university friends it provides energy certificates for buildings.

Since receiving its high speed upgrade it has been able to land contracts as far away as Swindon and Scotland.

Director Paul Sherry, said: "We made the decision to set up here as we are all local and wanted to be located outside a city to keep our costs lower.

"It used to take up 30 seconds to upload certificates, now it is done in an instant.

"There is no disadvantage compared to city-based business."

John Ammett, who runs JR Annett, a luxury picture frame business for high-end retailers at Warrenpoint in rural County Down, said the new connectivity speeds meant his business can expand into the rest of the UK.

Mr Ammett said: "We need to upload high quality photographs. Now it is done all online and quickly. The business is already saving a lot of money."