'Difference was amazing': Fibre broadband transforms Nore Valley Park in Kilkenny

Gareth Alcorn said his jaw almost dropped to the floor when he ran the first speed test on his newly-installed fibre broadband - It really was that fast.

The owner/operator of Nore Valley Park, a campsite and pet farm in Bennettsbridge in Kilkenny has been running the business for 14 years. It was established by his uncle and aunt 37 years ago and has gone from strength to strength over that time, attracting visitors from across Ireland and overseas.

“When I started here, we were on internet through the phone lines. It was 1.5 megabits per second, and it was brutal. No other word for it. Everything was slow. We really struggled online and emails were about all we could send. Anything we wanted to do on our website, or social media was hard work. It was just so, so slow,” he says.

“Then we got the satellite-type internet that went on the roof. It gave us 5G and gave us about 20 to 25 megabits per second. We were able to grow the business from that and had card readers and tills that could use the Wi-Fi. But it was slow and intermittent at times. Bad weather would have an impact on it.

“When fibre came, the difference was just amazing. You’d go on to download a movie on Netflix, and it downloaded faster than you’d send an email in the past. The difference that has made to the business has been unreal.

“We have been able to put in modems across the site. You can be sitting in a tent or a caravan and stream. You can have a facetime call. All our systems work off a cloud-based Dropbox services that allow us to interact with one another but save it all in the cloud. We don’t have to worry about something happening to a laptop or us losing stuff anymore.”

The phone signal in the Nore Valley is terrible – it’s a complete blackspot. But fibre-broadband means nobody is out of touch anymore. “With Wi-Fi calling now, even in some of our buildings which are 400 years old, with big thick walls that phone signals don’t get through, calling is not a problem.”

Having fibre also allows Nore Valley Park to pick up and answer messages from would-be customers immediately.

“When you have the technology, you can get those messages instantly. There are no lags, no delays. You can reply to them instantly and you don’t run the risk of losing a customer left waiting for an answer,” Gareth says.

“People expect high speed internet – it’s as normal as cars and shoes. People want to Google where they will go to eat, find out what time the bus is coming and get their tickets for a concert wherever they are. People do weekend breaks with us but they still need to connect in with work or their children want to stream a game or a movie. They can do all this now. It has revolutionised what we do here.”