To 5G or not to 5G

After a very big week of broadband announcements in Ireland, Adrian sits down with the person promising the most radical plan.

Imagine boss Sean Bolger says that his wireless broadband company will build a new national network to connect over 1m homes, including 400,000 of the 540,000 rural homes currently earmarked under the National Broadband Plan.

This, he says, will be done by building hundreds of sites (such as masts) around the country, which will deliver the service to antennae on rural homes.

But is this just another promise from a telecoms company? When will the rural homes he’s planning on connecting see the service?

And does this mean he intends to scupper or challenge the state-subsidised scheme, which would use taxpayers’ money to do an enhanced fibre-based version of the same thing?

Bolger has decades of experience in the Irish telecoms market. His was the company behind the WiMax wireless service that rose and fell some years ago.

But rural Ireland may be his biggest challenge yet.

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