SIRO Targets 114 Business and Retail Parks in Cork for Full Fibre Broadband Upgrade

Broadband network operator, SIRO, has today announced its plans to target businesses within 114 business and retail parks across Cork city and county for full fibre broadband upgrades. SIRO’s aims to provide fast, high-quality fibre-to-the-premises (full fibre) broadband to the thousands of business premises located in Cork business parks.

The announcement came as SIRO announced the completion of its network rollout in one of Cork’s most prominent business and retail parks, the East Gate Business Park. The Park is located in Little Island, east of Cork City and just off the N25 road network. Built and managed by the O’Flynn Group, the Park is a well-established location, boasting a range of high profile and successful companies such as LAYA, Lily, Pepsi, Gilead, Arcadis DPS Engineering and Xilinx.

SIRO has a significant fibre to the premise network spread across Cork encompassing the city itself and 17 towns right across the county from Skibbereen to Fermoy and Mitchelstown to Midleton. The company confirmed that business parks in Cork city and county are a now particular focus, with SIRO noting that many businesses operating within these parks remain stranded in ‘fibre broadband deserts’ still relying on slow and outdated copper-based broadband networks.

Comreg data published in June indicated that only 13% of all businesses are using fibre-to-the-premises (full fibre) broadband, despite fibre to the premises broadband now available to 86% of premises nationally. Poor connectivity can have significant negative effects on businesses – impacting employee productivity and team collaboration, customer service, adoption of essential technologies like Cloud or AI – all undermining business competitiveness and long-term growth.

According to SIRO, there can often be a lack of awareness amongst businesses that full fibre broadband may already be available in their business or retail park. To ease this information deficit, SIRO has now launched a unique online search tool, available on its website which will profile more than 600 business and retail parks across the country.

This search tool allows businesses to instantly check if SIRO’s network is available in their business park. This is the first time this service has been offered in the Irish market by a broadband operator.

SIRO’s business products currently offer speeds of up to 10 Gigabit symmetrical fibre broadband, with SIRO’s network designed to offer higher speeds, up to 25 Gigabits, as business demand for bandwidth grows in the years ahead.

 

SIRO Head of Enterprise Aoife O’Reilly noted:  

“Poor broadband connectivity can be a significant issue for business productivity and profitability. While the impact can be considerable, often it’s the last issue to be addressed. Take a small business with 20 employees, even 10 minutes per day of slow broadband for each employee amounts to 16 hours of lost productivity each week or 100 days over a full year. SIRO’s focus on building our network to businesses within these parks aims to address this deficiency by ensuring these key centres of economic activity have access to high quality and future proofed fibre broadband”  added Ms O’Reilly.

O’Flynn Group Property Director Michelle O’Flynn, added:

“EastGate Business Park is one of Ireland’s leading business and retail parks, providing best-in-class facilities to Irish and international companies. Ensuring that businesses within the park have access to exceptional services and utilities is a priority. High quality, fast, reliable and future-ready connectivity is now an essential business resource, making access to SIRO’s fibre to the premise broadband network a welcome addition to the onsite services available for businesses within the park.”

Businesses interested in finding out more about SIRO’s network, can find out more on https://siro.ie/business-parks/