Pieman Broadband Advance

Broadband in Ireland took a step forward on Friday when the Tyndall National Institute in Cork demonstrated advances in fibre-to-the-home networks. The breakthrough came from an EU-funded research collaboration, called PIEMAN, between BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, the Centre for Integrated Photonics (CIP), Ghent University and Tyndall. The group has designed a large-scale, high-speed network that has a span of around 100km (compared to 20km that is typically available today).

The network also features multiple colours of light to allow sharing of optical fibre and components across many sub-networks, which means that over 16,000 customers can be supported from a single network hub, leading to a dramatic fall in the costs associated with operating a fibre network. “Cutting-edge projects such as PIEMAN are helping to drive the development of next-generation networks, which are key enablers of the future Smart Economy,” said Minister for Science, Technology & Innovation Conor Lenihan.

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