As a lot of you have seen Imagine have rolled out the LTE broadband service to some homes in the area. A lot of you will have also found out, it is not available to everyone.

You need line of sight to the Imagine transmitters on the cell tower on the Slieve Glah high site. A lot of people do not have this and cannot avail of the service offered by Imagine.

Most will also know that the service provided by Eir is absolutely appalling, if you can get broadband connected from them your speeds are complete rubbish.

I spoke with an Eir engineer during the week who confirmed that in rural areas Fibre Broadband is ran above ground along the current telephone poles, therefore making it a relatively easy task to roll out Fibre Broadband to a large number of areas. The only thing stopping them is cost, if everyone is paying for telephone and (so called) broadband then there is no justification for them to rollout Fibre Broadband as there is no revenue uplift for them. They get paid the same money regardless of the service they provide so why improve it, that only costs them money.

What I suggest is that the residents of the area sign a partition demanding a proper service be offered by Eir. Eir is currently under huge pressure from other competing telecom companies in the market and if enough people get together, we can make change.

Today there were six Eir engineers working trying to fix the current copper connect on the Stradone to Cootehill road, surely is has to be more cost effective to run new cabling and make it fibre instead of having engineers wasting their time trying to fix what clearly cannot be fixed (ie. copper over distance)