Rural Kilkenny is facing a “bitterly disappointing” delay in the roll-out of fibre broadband.
The recent meeting of Castlecomer Municipal District heard that NBI won’t be completing the majority of their surveying in the area until 2022.
The council’s urging the national provider to bring their work forward, as they claim North Kilkenny can’t go another year with their current poor coverage.
And Clllr Mary Hilda Cavanagh says the setback is especially bad news for the many locals working from home, telling KCLR News “I’m bitterly disappointed with that news, I understood that most of the work would be done in 2021 and quite an amount of surveying has happened in this area and back across North Kilkenny so we thought that fibre broadband was just around the corner because our signal here is very iffy, no matter how much we pay it seems to be all the same and people are trying to work from home, people are trying to study from home and they need broadband as badly as we need electricity at this stage”.
She goes on to say “There’s no business, no farmer, no student, no anybody who doesn’t use broadband on a daily basis and who needs it on a daily basis, all of your work has to be done, no matter what business you’re in whether it’s farming or any commercial business, all of your work has to be done online now and you need a signal and you need a signal that will hold, if you’re attending a meeting, whether it’s an IFA meeting or a county council meeting or a meeting with your grandmother up the country you need to have a signal that can hold and people are paying enough for it”.
Cllr Cavanagh adds “There’s no week goes by but there are complaints, if you know what I mean, people know that we can’t personally do anything about it but they want us to keep the need for broadband, for fibre broadband, on the agenda non-stop and to keep pressurising the powers that be”.
