HEAnet is on track to meet the Government commitment to provide post-primary schools in 14 county areas with 100Mb/s broadband by end of October 2012.
Programme. This round of procurement to bring high speed broadband to educational institutions across Ireland will see services rolled out to post-primary schools in Cavan, Laois, Mayo, Sligo, Clare, Leitrim, Monaghan, Westmeath, Donegal, Longford, Offaly, Galway, Louth and Roscommon.
Schools will be connected under a multi-operator framework agreement with telcos Airspeed (taking on 90 schools); Digiweb (27 schools); e|net (80); and Imagine (five).
HEAnet was appointed as project manager in 2009 and has connected 78 schools to 100Mb/s connections under the first pilot phase of the programme.
In addition to broadband connectivity, HEAnet provides newly connected schools with a portfolio of associated services including a managed school router, centralised content filtering, firewall, anti-virus, and associated services.
This latest round of 202 school connections will mean 280 of Ireland's post-primary schools will be in a position to benefit from a 100Mb/s broadband connection from October 2012. Remaining post-primary schools will be connected over 2013 and 2014 as per the Government's national roll-out plan.
The programme is being sponsored by the Deptartment of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources (DCENR) and the Department of Education and Skills (DES) with the support of National Development Plan (NDP), European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and EUStructural Fund funding programmes.
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