Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) ISP Airband, which last year secured an investment of £16m and hopes to bring superfast broadband to a further 50,000 premises across England and Wales by 2021, has reported that they’ve nearly doubled their staff and have moved into a new Worcester office (Kirkham House).
Over the past couple of years Airband has secured a number of state aid supported Broadband Delivery UK contracts, such as in Shropshire, Devon and Somerset, which equates to around £25 million in existing contractual subsidies to help spread superfast broadband.
As a result of that and last year’s £16m investment from the National Digital Infrastructure Fund (here), Airband has been able to both expanded their network (on-going) and increase their staff count from 47 at the start of last year to 80 today. The growth has also necessitated a move into a bigger and better resourced office space.
Miranda Peel, Airband’s Human Resources Director, said:
“Airband is investing over £2m to deliver high speed fibre and wireless broadband to some of the most challenged rural areas across the UK, working with BDUK, local authorities and communities to build high availability infrastructure that residents, businesses and other ISP’s can access to help overcome the UK’s digital divide.”
Airband’s network is currently available across rural parts of Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, Devon, Somerset and Wales. The operator also has a few Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) style deployments, many of which are expected to start this year.
Slight typo on the second paragraph there Mark.
Oops. Fixed.
The Airband website seems a lot more ‘closed’ than it used to be.
Before you even get to see any pricing details you now have to enter a postcode where they can offer a service. Not long ago Im sure I could see package details and a proper coverage map showing where you can get their service. Its a shame when companies decide that they have to be shrouded in secrecy. Why not be more open?
Looking on waybackmachine back until 2017 (i didnt bother looking further than 2 years back) there was no coverage map, so you may be thinking of another wireless provider.
There was a coverage A-Z list which named specific areas, but the way it was done and how long it started to get (looking again at various time frames from waybackmachine) i am not shocked they removed that, as it just started to look messy.
The postcode check has always been there and you always had to either complete it before getting pricing or to find out if a specific package you wanted was available.
The Airband service on Dartmoor and Exmoor which was completed nearly 2 years ago has only just passed 10% take up – which translates to around 581 customers. Given that a fair number of these will be ‘free’ connections in return for siting for Airband equipment (120 locations was the reported figure) and that Airband received £4.6m subsidy to deploy the service, it begs the question, what has gone wrong?