LJUBLJANA (Slovenia), July 16 (SeeNews) – The EU will invest around 250 million euro ($282 million) in rural areas of Slovenia and Croatia to build broadband optical networks, local media reported on Tuesday, citing sources from RuNe Enia, the company in charge of the project.
The investment will be made as part of the Rural Network (RuNe) project co-funded by the EU and the European Investment Bank, The Slovenian Times reported.
The three-year rural network project will be launched this year and will bring Internet speeds of up to 10Gb/s to rural households. It envisages investment of around 200 million euro in Slovenia and some 50 million euro in Croatia.
The project aims to generate 1.0-1.7 billion euro of investments by providing 500 million euro in incentives, according to information posted on the European Commission's website.
In May, the Connecting Europe Broadband Fund (CEBF) financed by the European Commission said it finalised a deal in Slovenia to invest into a high-quality fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), open-access network for residential, business and public administration users in the rural areas of Slovenia covering over 240,000 locations.
The fund said that RuNe seeks to bring very high quality connectivity to citizens and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) established in rural areas of Slovenia and the Croatian counties of Primorsko-Goranska and Istarska.
The CEBF is a private equity fund which had its first closing in June 2018 at 420 million euro to invest in greenfield projects in the broadband infrastructure space across underserved areas in Europe.
($=0.88749 euro)