Cellnex’s €15m investment helps 100 communities to work from home

Cellnex Telecom has invested over €10m in new telecommunications infrastructure in its first year in the Irish market with the remaining additional investment on the enhancement of existing sites, supporting the delivery of improved mobile and wireless broadband coverage to over 100 communities as workers and families struggle with working and schooling from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since Cellnex completed the acquisition of Cignal in September 2019, it has built over 100 new telecom sites across all the 26 counties of the country, with 80% of these enabled with fibre infrastructure. Each of these new sites improves the mobile voice & wireless broadband signal and speeds of homes & businesses in the surrounding area by attracting new telecoms service providers and enhancing pre-existing services.

In addition to investing in new sites during 2020 Cellnex has also agreed a partnership with state forestry company Coillte that will see Cellnex invest €5m in rolling out fibre connections to the 300 Cellnex sites located on Coillte property. Fibre connections improve the backhaul capability of a site allowing for up to 10 times more data to be transmitted, faster speeds, and improved service levels.

To date, fibre infrastructure has already been delivered to over 30 Coillte sites with a further 50 sites identified for delivery over the coming months.

When Cellnex entered the Irish market, they committed to investing €60m to build up to 600 new sites by 2026 in areas poorly served by mobile & wireless broadband services in Ireland. This investment programme is on track, although the phasing of delivery has been slowed due to construction constraints during the pandemic, and the extension to the planning applications process introduced in April 2020.

This update on the company’s plans was shared by Cellnex Ireland at a webinar today to mark one year in business in Ireland. Cellnex Telecom is Europe’s leading operator of wireless telecommunications and broadcasting infrastructure with an existing portfolio of 61,000 telecom sites located in Ireland, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

The importance of Ireland’s communications infrastructure has come to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic as people have had to work from home. In a recent survey by Bank of Ireland, businesses cited telecommunications as the priority area for infrastructure investment, with the number of firms identifying it as a priority, up sharply since pre-Covid.

Recent research by ComReg also supports the case for further investment in wireless infrastructure, with a third (32%) of people in rural areas finding their broadband inadequate to meet their needs, and almost one in five (19%) mobile phone users in rural areas reporting that their experience of using 3G or 4G data since Covid has deteriorated.

Cellnex’s ongoing investment programmes support the objectives of the Mobile Phone and Broadband Taskforce established by the Government in 2016 to identify solutions to mobile phone coverage deficits across the country. Currently, 20 of Cellnex’s sites are being used in the implementation of the National Broadband Plan and supporting the roll-out of Business Connection Points (BCPs) to deliver free high-speed internet access in some of the most isolated and rural communities in the country.

Colin Cunningham, Managing Director, Cellnex Ireland said:

“We are very pleased with the progress we have made in Ireland over the last year. Over 100 communities in the country are now benefiting from the improved coverage that our investment in new site infrastructure has delivered in the past 12 months. We have nearly 500 further sites to deliver in our plans and will continue to work with operators to provide infrastructure in new locations so that they are able to offer improved mobile service to their customers. This has never been more important or timely than now with COVID-19.

Whether its video conferencing for work, doing grocery shopping online, or accessing Government services via the internet, we have all become increasingly reliant on the quality of the communications network in and around our homes.”

“We are also delighted to have entered a partnership with Coillte that means we are enabling fibre connectivity to 300 sites on their land. This improves the capability of the sites allowing for up to 10 times more data to be transmitted and at much higher speeds.”

Cellnex is also exploring offering additional services to customers in Ireland, including additional fibre infrastructure, indoor coverage improvement solutions and Smart City infrastructure deployments. Earlier this month Cellnex agreed a joint venture with Everynet that is facilitating the deployment of low power wide area (LoRaWAN) technology that local councils can use to monitor air quality, waste management, and public parking and other essential services.

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here.

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 50,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles.

If you would like to be featured in our podcast series drop us a line & don’t forget to sign up for notifications for our latest episodes and follow us on Twitter, Linkedin, SoundCloud, iTunes or your own favourite podcast platform.

Contact us, by email, Twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully, we can share your story too and reach our global audience. We are agile, responsive, quick and talented, we look forward to working with you!

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking