Rural UK Broadband ISP Airband Adds 40 Staff and New CFO

Rural focused fixed wireless and full fibre (FTTP) ISP Airband, which aims to cover a further 50,000 premises across the whole of England and Wales by 2021, has so far hired an additional 40 staff this year and they’ve just appointed Jeffrey Kriek to be their new Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

The ISP is currently being supported by an earlier investment of £16m via the National Digital Infrastructure Fund (here), plus there’s another £25m or so on top of that if you include all of their state aid supported Building Digital UK (BDUK) contracts with various local authorities (Shropshire, Devon and Somerset, Herefordshire etc.)

Suffice to say that Airband are busy growing to meet the demands of both their customers and network contracts. As part of that they now have a new CFO via Jeffrey Kriek, who with 20 years of banking and finance experience under his belt has joined the ISP from Helios Towers – a UK telecoms tower infrastructure company.

No doubt Airband will be keen for Kriek to help them in their efforts to attract even more investment into the business.

Redmond Peel, Founder and Director of Airband, said:

“We’re privileged to have Jeffrey on board as the new CFO of Airband. He brings strong operational and strategic finance experience to the role and his great track record and telecoms experience will help us secure investment that can fast-track Airband to the next stage.

Ultrafast broadband has become mainstream and we have a short window of opportunity to consolidate our position as a market leader in the rural fibre broadband market.

Our rural expertise and history of being trusted by government partners and other stakeholders is the perfect foundation for success as we hyper-scale in order to deliver better broadband to as many areas as possible. Jeffrey’s extensive experience in raising debt and equity capital, is perfect for what we are trying to achieve, and I’m very much looking forward to working with him through one of the most exciting and challenging periods in the history of the telecoms industry.”

Mr Kriek said he was “thrilled” to join the provider and added that “securing further funding will enable us to invest in our operations and in an ambitious recruitment drive, giving us even greater capacity to deploy fibre networks at speed and significantly increase our market presence – notably in rural areas.”

Meanwhile the ISP waved goodbye to its current Finance Director, Andrew Price, who is leaving after 18 months on the board.