Why you can’t always get the same broadband as your neighbour.
Broadband availability in Ireland is decided by which wholesale network reaches your address, not by which provider you choose. Once you see how the networks and the retailers fit together, the fact that a deal is available on one street and not the next stops being a mystery.
Two layers, not one
The company that owns the cable isn’t usually the one that bills you.
Irish broadband runs on two layers. The wholesale networks own the physical infrastructure, the fibre or cable that reaches your home. The retailers are the providers you actually sign up with and pay. Most retailers own no network of their own; they rent access to a wholesale network and sell it on to you.
This is why the same provider can be available at one address and not another. They are only available where the network they rent from reaches. Change the address, change which networks are present, change which providers can serve you.
The four networks
Four fixed networks cover Ireland, unevenly.
The ComReg address checker lists four fixed broadband networks. Open eir is the widest, reaching around 95 per cent of the country, a wholesale network you cannot buy from directly. SIRO, a joint venture between the ESB and Vodafone, runs pure fibre over ESB’s electricity poles across a growing list of towns. NBI is the state-backed rollout bringing fibre to rural addresses the commercial networks did not reach. Virgin Media runs its own cable network in mainly urban areas, and is the one case where the network owner also sells to you directly.
Most addresses are reached by one or two of these, not all four. Rural addresses are often NBI only. City-centre addresses are frequently Open eir or Virgin rather than SIRO. Which you have is the single biggest factor in what speeds and prices are open to you, and it is entirely determined by where you live.
Why it matters when you compare
Half the deals you see may not be available to you.
Because availability is set by the network, a national list of broadband deals is misleading by default. Plenty of the offers you see advertised run on networks that do not reach your address, so comparing them is comparing things you cannot actually buy. The only comparison that means anything is one filtered to your own address first.
Finding out what you can get
Start with the address, not the deal.
The free neutral option is the ComReg address checker, which will tell you which of the four networks reach your eircode. It has no commercial interest in what you choose, which makes it a good sanity check. What it does not do is price anything, so you still have to work out which of the available plans is actually the best value once you know your networks.
That second step is where Shrewd comes in. A broadband verdict starts by checking what is genuinely available at your address, then prices only those plans, so you are choosing between deals you can actually get rather than a national list padded with ones you can’t. And because we take no commission, the verdict can tell you to stay on what you have when that is the right answer.
Once you know your network
The deal still ends. Watch the same cliff.
Knowing your network tells you what you can get. It does not change how the deals are structured once you are on one, which is the same promotional-then-standard pattern as everywhere else. So once you’ve picked a plan, the price still steps up when the promo ends, and re-contracting is often better than switching when it does.
Network coverage and operator details reflect the Irish market as of July 2026. Networks expand and operator arrangements change, so confirm what reaches your own address before deciding.