For years, "the broadband is desperate out here" was a perfectly fair complaint in rural Roscommon. It's fast going out of date. The National Broadband Plan (the state scheme bringing fibre to the rural areas commercial operators skipped) is due to finish its main rollout by the end of this year, and the numbers for our county are better than most people realise.
The strange part: most businesses haven't switched
This is the figure that surprised me. ComReg research from late 2025 found that just 12% of Irish businesses are on a full fibre connection, even though it's available to 81% of premises. Nationally, average take-up on the new rural network is around 37%. Decent, but that still means most premises that could have fibre are sitting on older, slower connections.
The reasons, according to that research, are mostly awareness and cost. Plenty of business owners simply don't know the fibre has arrived on their road. Others assume switching is a big, expensive disruption. It usually isn't. And if you're paying for an old copper-based connection, you may well be paying similar money for a fraction of the speed and reliability.
Why it matters more than raw speed
The headline speed is nice. For a small business or a busy household, these count for more:
- Reliability. Fibre doesn't degrade in bad weather or with distance from the exchange the way copper does. Cloud accounts packages, card machines, video calls and cloud backup all stop being a gamble.
- Upload speed. Old connections were built for downloading. Fibre uploads are dramatically faster, and that's what matters for backups, sending large files, CCTV and remote working.
- The copper switch-off. The old copper network is being wound down, and the European Commission has proposed 2030 as the latest date for decommissioning legacy copper networks. If your phone line or broadband still runs on copper, a move is coming eventually anyway. Better to do it on your own schedule.
How to check your own premises (takes one minute)
NBI is a wholesale operator. It builds the network but doesn't sell to the public. You buy from a normal provider, and over 50 of them sell connections on the new network. So the process is:
- Put your Eircode into the coverage checker at nbi.ie. It tells you whether you can order now or when your area is due.
- If you're ready to connect, compare a few providers on price and contract length. The underlying fibre is the same network either way.
- If you're in a town and not covered by the rural scheme, you likely have commercial fibre available instead. Same one-minute check on your provider's website.
What I'd do this week
The rollout rural Roscommon waited a decade for is nearly done. Most of the county can order today, the speeds are a different world from what came before, and copper is on borrowed time. Put your Eircode into the checker. It costs nothing, and if the fibre is there, switching is usually far less hassle than people expect. If the broadband is finally fast but your Wi-Fi still isn't, that can be fixed too.
