The Hungarian Government Informatics Development Agency (KIFU) held a presentation marking the completion of national broadband development projects under the EU-assisted Superfast Internet Programme (SZIP) which began in 2016 and received more than HUF3 billion (USD8.7 million) in EU grants under KIFU’s management.
KIFU noted that today nearly 97% of households in Hungary are covered by high speed fixed internet networks. The Digital Agenda of the EU set the goal that by 2020 every household should have access to internet access at a speed of at least 30Mbps, with at least half of households to be covered by services capable of 100Mbps-plus speeds. Hungary’s 30Mbps fixed network coverage exceeded 95% by 2020, with the remainder of homes offered special mobile internet tariffs made available under the government programme, while by end-2022 the proportion of Hungarian households capable of 1Gbps access exceeded a two-thirds threshold. 3,800 public institutions, schools and municipalities received modern optical network connections within the framework of the programme.
Under the SZIP initiatives, a national electronic communications database was created for handling tenders for network development and for supervisory engineering support for the implementation of grant-winning projects, and in the framework of the state-subsidised tenders nearly 350,000 ‘places of need’ were covered in 196 district tenders, while about 300,000 places of need were covered under independent commitments of Hungarian telecoms service providers.