NI broadband coming to rural areas

Broadband infrastructure in remote rural areas depends on UK government funding, which the NI Department for the Economy (DfE) is working to secure.

Funds are coming from the UK government to roll out superfast (1,000 megabits per second) broadband to all parts of NI thanks to Project Gigabit, which the DfE expects will be rolled out within the next three to four years. Nigel Robbins, Broadband Project Director at the DfE, said this could mean NI would be the first part of the UK “with near ubiquitous access to gigabit-capable broadband”.

An open market review, which looked at the areas that weren’t getting broadband, shows that gigabit-capable broadband will reach close to 880,000 premises in NI. That leaves 85,504 premises without access to gigabit-capable broadband, as they are considered commercially unviable.

The majority of eligible premises likely to benefit from Project Gigabit are expected to be homes and businesses that may have access to superfast broadband (speeds of 30 Mbps or above), but which are reliant on technology solutions not capable of delivering gigabit broadband speeds (for example, copper line services).

Project Gigabit follows in the steps of the DfE’s Superfast broadband programme and the DfE’s broadband intervention programme Project Stratum.

Designs for changing weather

Recent modelling data from Met Éireann shows that overheating is “expected to become more severe in the future”.

Rainfall is expected to come in more heavy bursts in winter too, leading to drainage systems potentially being overwhelmed, as the meteorological agency predicts little rainfall in summer. The Met Éireann climate data is expected to feed into house building designs, to model for more extreme weather events; it’s freely available from housing.gov.ie and met.ie

Self-builds prop up housing stock

Completions and commencements are at record levels in ROI, and self-builds are propping up the mortgage market in rural regions, according to a new report.

The Banking & Payments Federation Ireland‘s Housing Market Monitor for the first quarter of 2023 shows the vast majority of mortgages in rural areas are drawn down for self-builds.

The self-build share in total housing output has declined over the past number of years, the report states, but self-builds still account for nearly 18 per cent of total completions, which include apartment and developer homes, in Q1 of 2023.

You can check if your house might get faster broadband on online.economy-ni. gov.uk/ProjectGigabit

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