Airband Scoop Best Small Biz at National Family Business Awards

Wireless broadband ISP Airband has been named as the ‘Best Small Business‘ for the Midlands region and they also scooped up the national ‘Best Entrepreneur of the Year‘ accolade as part of this year’s National Family Business Awards 2018 (formerly the Red Ribbon Awards).

The awards, which are organised and hosted by Family Business Place, assessed each nominee via a 15 minute Skype interview before selecting a short-list of potential finalists. After that the winners were chosen by a judging panel, although we couldn’t find much information to clarify who sits on the panel or precisely what they look for in each finalist.

Otherwise the event itself took place on 14th July 2018 at Wembley Stadium in London. Airband was the only UK ISP to win an award on the night.

Red Peel, Airband Director, said:

“We’re delighted to have won these prestigious National Family Business Awards. In the post-Brexit world, tech-focused innovation is even more of a game-changer for British business. Broadband is regarded as the fourth utility service but large swathes of rural areas have poor or intermittent service.

Robust rural broadband needs a blend of different technologies and we’re proud to be playing our part in creating the best possible infrastructure for rural broadband, using the most innovative and effective solutions.

Going forwards, I think the focus should be not just on rolling out faster services, but also about working out why people with faster options haven’t upgraded”.

The PR blurb notes that the company, which was founded in 2009 by husband and wife team Redmond and Miranda Peel, has over the past 3 years delivered “superfast broadband” projects worth £23m to at least 34,000 homes and businesses in rural areas across England and Wales (e.g. the Connecting Devon and Somerset contract). The win follows recent setbacks with a couple of mast deployments (here).