Airspeed invests €1.5m to boost broadband connectivity

AirSpeed Telecom is set to boost its broadband connectivity with a €1.5 million investment in its facilities across the country to help deliver multi-gigabit connectivity.

As part of the investment, the company has done a deal with Coillte that sees the telecoms firm use Coillte's fibre-enabled tower on Three Rock Mountain. The company plans to roll out 10Gb connectivity over the network.

Peter Hendrick, technical director with AirSpeed, said customers were demanding more bandwidth from telecoms companies, and this was driving its push to invest in the network.

“From our perspective, it supports the growing demand for bandwidth. We have various infrastructure options for customers,” he said.

Resilience

“Businesses are coming to us for more bandwidth predominantly because of cloud services. Years ago it was about getting internet connection with the highest speed available. Speed has become expected. Resilience is as important as speed.”

AirSpeed can offer 1Gb speeds on the last mile.

The agreement saw AirSpeed move its services from its existing tower to Coillte’s, and bring fibre to the cabinet. The fibre work was completed last week, with the move to Coillte’s tower taking place several weeks earlier.

“We can offer existing customers continued scalability in terms of service,” he said.

The investment will also support additional services, such as security and cloud-based firewall services. AirSpeed offers management of such services for companies, maintaining security for the firms.

AirSpeed offers telecommunications services to large enterprises, public sector bodies and SME businesses in Ireland and Northern Ireland, specialising in uncontended, symmetrical fibre and wireless broadband services.

Connectivity

“Our customers are increasingly looking for scalability and resilient connectivity and because we aren’t a single-technology provider – we use fibre, DSL and radio – we can deliver customers technology resilience without their needing to use a separate carrier,” said Liam O’Kelly, managing director of AirSpeed.

The company currently employs 47 people across the island of Ireland, with two offices in Dublin and Cork.

In line with the increasing importance of the Northern Ireland market to AirSpeed, the company opened its third office in Belfast last year, and recently partnered with Rainbow Communications to deliver 200Mbps connectivity to the Argyle Business Centre in Belfast. Among its clients are RTÉ, HEANet, Dairygold, and VHI Healthcare.