Almost 31 per cent of Irish households now have a broadband connection to the internet according to new data released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). John Collinsreports.

The CSO's Information Society Statistics for the first quarter of 2007 underline the rapid growth in broadband use in the Republic in the last three years. In 2005, just 7 per cent of homes had a broadband connection, a figure that had risen to just 13 per cent last year.

For the first time the figures indicate that the number of households connected to the internet via broadband has surpassed those connected by older technologies such as dial-up or ISDN.

The data, which is collected as part of the quarterly national household survey, also shows that a growing number of Irish households are buying home computers. The data suggests more than one million homes now have PCs. At the end of the first quarter of 2007, there were 998,000 homes with PCs .