What the UK can learn from Ireland’s rural fibre plan

Ireland’s state-backed rural fibre network lifted median download speeds in its target area from 11.6Mbps to 157Mbps in under seven years, new measured data shows, closing the rural-urban gap to a degree no comparable UK programme has yet matched.

The findings come from connectivity intelligence firm Ookla, which carried out the first independent measured evaluation of Ireland’s National Broadband Plan (NBP) by matching millions of anonymised Speedtest results to the official map of the state’s “Intervention Area” and to the record of when each locality went live.

The analysis credits the programme with one of the steepest sustained fixed-broadband improvements Ookla has recorded in any developed market.

For UK policymakers steering Project Gigabit toward the hardest-to-reach premises, the Irish result is a live test of a very different design choice, and the numbers behind it are now on the table.

Ireland backed one operator and one technology

Where the UK spread its subsidies across many suppliers and a mix of technologies, Ireland contracted a single wholesale-only operator, National Broadband Ireland (NBI), to build full fibre to roughly 566,000 premises that no commercial operator would serve.

The contract was signed in November 2019 after a procurement that ended with just one bidder, the consortium led by Granahan McCourt, with Spanish infrastructure investor Asterion later taking an 80% stake.

NBI sells nothing to consumers directly. More than 50 retail providers resell the network, so the bill, router and brand belong to the retailer while the fibre underneath is common to all.

The build runs entirely on Nokia XGS-PON equipment capable of 10Gbps, with an entry product set at 500Mbps from launch and tiers now reaching 5Gbps. Rural Ireland, on Ookla’s reading, was handed a newer access layer than most of urban Europe.

The speed jump lands the month fibre goes live

Across the Intervention Area, median download rose from 11.6Mbps in 2019 to 157Mbps in the year to mid-2026, a 13.5-fold increase, while median upload climbed from 4.67Mbps to 49.48Mbps. The share of homes below 30Mbps fell from 84% to 14%, and a quarter now measure above 300Mbps.

Aligning each area to its official switch-on date, Ookla found measured medians sat flat at around 27Mbps for two years, then inflected vertically the month service opened, passing 150Mbps within twelve months.

Tracking the same recurring testers across their activation date, the typical connected home saw its measured speed multiply by 10.3, a like-for-like comparison that rules out any change in who was being measured.

NBI reported average take-up of around 37% of premises passed, exceeding 60% in the areas live longest. Over 490,000 premises had been passed by mid-2026, equivalent to 87% of the planned footprint.

Rural uploads have overtaken the cities

The most consequential finding for the long run sits on the upload side. Median upload across the Intervention Area overtook urban Ireland during 2026, at roughly 53Mbps against 51Mbps, and the gap is widening.

Parts of urban Ireland still lean on Virgin Media’s asymmetric cable and open eir’s legacy VDSL, both of which cap most uplink plans near 50Mbps and are now being upgraded.

Upload capacity is the dimension that matters most for remote work, cloud backup, video calling and small-business hosting. A state programme built for the hardest premises has, on this measure, leapfrogged the commercial networks serving the country’s cities.

The bill was high

The design concentrated risk in one counterparty and one technology, and the cost is the programme’s most contested feature.

The subsidy is capped at €2.7 billion ($3.1 billion), with official figures putting the base subsidy between €3,569 and €3,946 per premises depending on county, and a ceiling near €4,800 once contingency and VAT are counted.

That is multiples of what gap-funded schemes pay in denser markets.

Academic work in Telecommunications Policy attributes the escalation from an original €175 million projection to the collision of a full-fibre mandate with Ireland’s low-density geography and a single-bidder procurement.

Ookla’s counter-argument is that cheaper mixed-technology builds bought slower networks already being upgraded at further cost, while Ireland’s premium bought an asset with 10Gbps headroom and a performance dividend that arrived immediately.

The relevant yardstick, it argued, is cost per decade of adequacy rather than cheapest subsidy per premises.

Starlink only grows where the fibre hasn’t reached

Ireland’s staggered rollout created a natural experiment on satellite broadband.

In townlands still unserved by mid-2026, Starlink accounted for 14.3% of fixed testing devices and was still climbing. In townlands connected to fibre since 2021 and 2022, its share stayed below 2% for five years with no growth.

Satellite subscriptions more than doubled nationally in the year to late 2025, but Ookla found that growth concentrated almost entirely in the shrinking territory the build has not yet reached.

On this evidence, low Earth orbit satellite functions as a bridge and a real-time map of unmet demand, not a substitute for wireline investment.

The lesson comes with a warning on displacement

Dozens of regional fixed wireless operators had spent two decades building businesses in exactly the territory the State chose to overbuild.

The largest, Imagine, was valued at around €200 million when international capital bought in during 2018 and objected that the full-fibre mandate was designed around it.

The objection failed. Its network expansion stopped, its mid-band spectrum is being transferred to national mobile operators, and in early 2025 it became a reseller of the state network that displaced it.

The wholesale-only design at least gave displaced operators somewhere to go, and Ookla’s data shows regional wireless brands re-platforming onto the subsidised fibre as retailers, carrying their customers with them as their own network assets wound down.

Consumers won unambiguously, but private rural capital was stranded and spectrum consolidated toward national operators.

The remaining Irish build, roughly 80,000 premises, sits in the hardest geography.

Ookla’s read for governments still setting rural targets in fibre terms is that the binding constraints are execution and patience rather than demand, and that the performance dividend, once the network arrives, is immediate, measurable and large.

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