Arriving
How good is the broadband if you move to the countryside?
Ireland has caught up on fibre within a few years and today reports a higher share of addresses with full fibre than the UK does. Even so, one sentence applies to your house purchase: check the address, not the country.
When a family from Britain, Scandinavia or the Low Countries thinks about a house in the Irish countryside, this question usually comes late and is then urgent: will the line cope with two people working from home and children streaming in the evening?
The national figures are good, and better than most people expect. For comparison, Ofcom counted full fibre available to 82 per cent of UK homes in January 2026.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Premises that can get fibre to the home | 87% |
| Premises that can get gigabit | 92% |
| Every county at least | 80% |
| Counties above 90 per cent | 14 |
| Best county (Westmeath) | 95% |
| Share of active broadband connections that are fibre | 63% |
Available means: a connection can be ordered at that address. Whether it has been ordered is a different number; fibre is used by just over half of the households that could get it.
Source: ComReg, Quarterly Key Data Report Q2 2026, as published by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport on 16 September 2026. As of: retrieved 17 September 2026.
And now the sentence that matters more than any percentage: fibre is not available everywhere in Ireland. 87 per cent is good. It is not 100. The missing 13 per cent are not spread evenly but lie mostly where a family moving in likes to buy a house with land.
The intervention area
Where the market does not build of its own accord, the state does. Under the National Broadband Plan, National Broadband Ireland is building a fibre network in exactly the areas no commercial provider serves. That area covers around 566,000 premises.
| Measure | Premises |
|---|---|
| In the intervention area in total | around 566,000 |
| Network passes the premises, connection can be ordered | 523,688 |
| Actually connected | 190,737 |
Passed means: the network reaches the address and a connection can be ordered. Connected means: someone has ordered it.
Source: National Broadband Ireland, progress figures on nbi.ie; press release of 29 July 2026 on reaching 500,000 premises passed. As of: retrieved 17 September 2026.
NBI itself says the main build is on track for the end of 2026. In its release of 29 July 2026, announcing that it had passed 500,000 premises, the company said the main infrastructure rollout remained on track for completion by the end of 2026. Six counties were finished at that point, among them Waterford, and NBI expected eleven more to be completed by the end of October.
That is the company’s statement about its own project, not a promise from the state and no guarantee for your address. A finished main build in a county also does not mean that a connection reaches every single house there.
Alongside it stands a second date that means something else: by 2028 every household and every business in Ireland is to be able to reach a gigabit network. That is a government target for the whole country and includes the commercially served areas. For your purchase contract in 2027, neither counts; only the check for your address does.
Check the Eircode before you sign
Every Irish address has an Eircode, a seven-character code that identifies a single building, not a street or a district. That is exactly why it is the right tool for this question.
The providers and National Broadband Ireland run checkers into which you type the Eircode and which tell you what is available at that address and, if nothing is yet, which build phase it falls in. That takes a minute and belongs in the same week as the building survey, not the week after you move in.
Two houses on the same road can come out differently, and a house at the end of a long lane often fares worse than the village it belongs to. Anyone who works from home therefore makes the answer a condition of the offer, not a hope.
How the purchase otherwise works and when each step falls due is set out on our page on buying. If the line is not good enough and the place is still right, it is worth looking at the towns of the region that have long had their fibre.
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