Airband Boosts Rural UK Full Fibre Rollout to 600,000 Premises

Worcestershire-based wireless and full fibre broadband ISP Airband has today secured a significant £100m investment boost (debt financing) to help accelerate their rollout of a new ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which will now aim to cover 600,000 UK premises by the end of 2025.

The provider had previously (November 2020) committed to cover 500,000 premises by the end of 2025 (here), which occurred after Aberdeen Standard Investments (ASI) acquired a majority stake in the company. By comparison, today’s agreement reflects a £100m debt package from an international banking consortium including HSBC, Lloyds, Nord LB and Sabadell.

At present Airband has networks across nine counties in the UK – including the Midlands, Shropshire, Cheshire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Wales and Devon and Somerset. But until fairly recently many of those deployments involved Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) networks, although over the past couple of years they’ve started to build much more FTTP and hold a number of key state aid supported contracts (e.g. Devon and Somerset).

The new investment will accelerate their rollout to cover an additional 100,000 premises (600,000 total) by the same date as before. As part of that, over 10,000km of new fibre will be deployed across “hundreds of rural communities” in a bid to provide homes in the West of England and Home Counties with “future-proof connections“.

Airband’s founder, Redmond Peel, said:

“We created Airband in 2009 to supply rural areas with the high-quality internet they deserve. The pandemic has increasingly highlighted the deficit some communities in the UK face when it comes to services that those living in urban areas take for granted. Access to reliable and fast broadband that is fit for modern day lives – from home education and online grocery shopping during the lockdown through to the digitisation of many services, such as banking and streaming entertainment – can no longer be considered a luxury, but rather a basic utility.”

Airband added that they also facilitate projects within the community that have a positive societal impact. For example, it has given Devon Air Ambulance access to its broadband on a tactically important farmland site in Romansleigh, in North Devon. This has allowed the service to establish a night landing site that uses remote control lighting on Airband’s telegraph pole in order to operate safely.