Scottish ISP HighNet Attracts Investment from Shawbrook Bank

Business broadband ISP HighNet has revealed that an unspecific investment from Shawbrook Bank has enabled the company to be “fully business as usual” during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, while at the same time continuing to fuel its growth by investing in new hardware and additional IP addresses.

The Inverness-based firm, which also has an office in Glasgow, claims to have replicated their office IT set-up (with multiple monitors on every workstation) for their staff at home (remote working), enabling them to work successfully during the lockdown.

Shawbrook’s earlier funding had also allowed the firm to purchase a “large range” of IP addresses, which are essential for providing services to its growing customer base. We don’t usually see ISPs boasting about the purchase of common necessities like IP addresses, which makes us wonder whether this included more IPv4 space rather than IPv6.

HighNet approached Shawbrook for funding due to the Bank’s reputation as a specialist lender in the technology sector.

Scott MacRae, Finance Director at HighNet, said:

“We offer our clients state of the art voice, data and mobile connectivity through our dedicated high-speed network, and we work with many businesses and organisations across all of Scotland’s major cities.

Operating a business-grade telecoms network requires us continually to re-invest in hardware, software and other resources to deliver a best in class service. With thousands of customer sites connected to our high-speed broadband network and increasing demand from business customers, the purchase of additional IP addresses was essential for our growth.

The Covid-19 outbreak posed another challenge for the safety and well-being of our staff, who all had to move to home-working. We expected that a combination of home-working and office-working would continue for some time and could become our ‘new normal’. This meant that a suite of brand-new workstations and monitors had to be purchased to enable that transition to go as smoothly as possible and for the business to continue to operate smoothly under lockdown and beyond.”

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