Airband Suffers Slow Broadband Speeds in Shropshire and Herefordshire UPDATE
Rural-focused UK broadband ISP Airband, which is deploying a mix of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) networks across various parts of the country, appears to be suffering some problems in the Shropshire and Herefordshire (England) areas after customers reported a sharp drop in speeds.
According to customers, the issues started a couple of weeks ago and some users have seen speeds drop below 5Mbps. The provider’s website acknowledged this on 28th Nov with a brief update: “We are aware of and working on an issue that might be causing degraded service in Shropshire and Herefordshire areas. We are aiming to get this resolved as soon as possible.” But there was also a similar incident listed between 24th – 28th Nov.
We’ve included a couple of example customer complaints below.
Sample Complaint 1
“I can confirm that the service has been severely degraded for days, and several attempts to fix the on going problem as they call it, have failed previously.
Throughout the working day and up until about 1 am my download speed which was supposed to be 40 Mbs and was at least half that even at busy times, rarely rises above 0.5Mbs. At best, which is rare, it is less than 2Mbs We have excellent line of sight.
The upload speed is supposed to be 10Mbs on the contract, and this always measures close to that figure. So the wireless signal itself is not at fault.
I have come to believe that Airband has signed on too many customers to the service and for whatever reason cannot or will not act to upgrade their network. However, it is impossible as a customer to get a straight answer to the question. No timescale for a solution has been given and their website frequently claims services are operational when an enquiry demonstrates they are not.
The problem is not helped by their ticketing system for faults. You are constantly being told that a ticket has been resolved and another one opened for the same fault. The numbering system is opaque and you can never be sure which fault they are referring to as they do not mention it in the response.”
Sample Complaint 2 (Steve)
“I think we all understand that rural broadband is a technical challenge for providers like Airband and one of the downsides we accept, living away from the main towns. It’s just difficult to understand how a service that was so good for over three years can totally collapse for over two months and still not be resolved – what went so badly wrong that cannot be undone quickly ?”
The last update to be posted about this occurred yesterday, when Airband added that they were “continuing to investigate this issue.” So far as we can tell from the limited feedback, the problem seems to affect those on their wireless network the worst, although fibre connections have also seen degraded performance.
UPDATE 7:23am
A spokesperson for Airband has now responded: “We have been conducting a number of planned upgrades and essential maintenance works on parts of our infrastructure that affect customers in Shropshire and Herefordshire. Customers have been informed in advance via email and / or SMS, and live updates posted on https://www.airband.co.uk/support/network-status/ .”
However, this conflicts with the active service status message on Airband’s own page. The provider has been conducting some maintenance work in parts of the two regions at the same time, but those events lasted less than a day and are all listed as having completed.
UPDATE 5pm
We queried this further and received the following response, which adds a bit more detail: “We have an ongoing network maintenance and improvement programme, and in recent weeks this has highlighted a number of issues we have had to address. Right now a combination of on-site and online engineering teams are addressing these in order to improve the consistency of service in certain parts of Shropshire and Herefordshire. We apologies for the inconvenience this is causing some of our customers.”
Sadly, there’s still no indication of how long it will take to complete all of this work.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Airband are rubbish, Useless and pointless.
Have you been a customer of theirs? If so, then a more constructive feedback on experience would be helpful.
@Mark
To be fair the OP did say “Airband are rubbish, Useless and pointless.”
If you’ve ever experienced the FWA service they offer, that would be the constructive feedback on the experience. It is *awful* – and you know this because YOU have reported on it before!
Or we could look at the reviews on *THIS* site:
2nd December – “connection has been intermittent” since Feb 2022 – “everything semes to be broken” – “apologetic but clueless call centre”
or how about 21st October 2022:
“speed nowhere near advertised”
“flaky at best”
“support sporadic uninformed 1st line”
…does it sound like Phil’s comments were uninformed or inaccurate, or even unconstructive? I don’t think so Mark…
I’d say there is *every* chance Phil has used them and experienced the garbage service they provide.
@Vince. Happy to be proven wrong if Phil (ADSLMax) has been a customer, but as he posts random stuff on most news items, then it’s very hard to tell.
hhhmmm sounds like a typica Phil (ADSLMax) (just change the provider / product) response frankly based on my experience over the last 10 years or so
Sure, if Phil is Max then it is likely nonsense (but you didn’t actually say that).
But your reviews also agree with the sentiment – and I *do* have experience of it and have been out to customers using the tragic mess that is Airband FWA. It has always been really hit and miss, mostly miss – and it isn’t just that some installations are marginal or have difficulty seeing the other side, it can have a great signal and still be bad – unclear precisely what backhaul capability they really have on those older installations.
@Mark
It is true, their FWA offering is poor to say the least. I’m a self employed comms engineer covering the South West and most internet issues I face are Airband, Wildanet or Sky broadband related.
Airband have some very weird routing going on. Speed tests sometimes auto geo-locate to US servers, very intermittent speeds and their networking equipment is also a peculiar (and pricey!) choice.
[Comment removed: For your own protection, please do not use public comments to make potentially slanderous remarks]
The comments above ratify my now deleted comment. Public money is being tipped into this company and no one holds them accountable.
These are my d/l speeds from Airband over the last 24 hours:
time mbps
10:43 39.31
11:14 41.01
11:44 33.52
12:14 16.29
12:44 21.91
13:14 22.86
13:45 32.62
14:15 27.97
14:45 21.28
15:15 38.56
15:45 35.69
16:16 20.27
16:46 20.36
17:16 16.95
17:46 14.73
18:16 17.00
18:47 18.90
19:17 13.79
19:47 9.70
20:17 12.43
20:48 8.34
21:18 10.68
21:48 7.83
22:18 10.32
22:48 6.98
23:19 15.99
23:49 20.30
00:19 24.13
00:49 40.83
01:20 41.01
01:50 41.22
02:20 40.92
02:50 41.12
03:20 40.85
03:51 40.88
04:21 40.93
04:51 40.50
05:21 40.95
05:51 40.94
06:21 41.36
06:52 41.07
07:22 38.46
07:52 28.37
08:22 20.34
08:52 15.59
09:23 20.76
09:53 23.37
10:23 34.15
10:53 18.65
Looks like very clear congestion based on those tests. Too much demand for bandwidth, not enough supply.
As a hopefully objective comment, my experience in the Shropshire borders is that they oversell their FWA product. This area was shown as in scope, but nobody local could get a signal. Their mast is close to an EE 4G mast, but lower down. 4G coverage is excellent, even some distance from the mast, so no reason to pursue FWA.
Unfortunately, the poor reputation of FWA taints their FTTP offering as well, so we get the knee-jerk “Airband are rubbish” comments, both here and on other forums.
Some nice speeds from 1am-7am! Suit the night shift…
Wasnt it BDUK money used aswell for this terrible service?
I’d second the sentiment that “Airband are rubbish”.
We’re currently on one of their FWA links and it’s hopelessly congested on the download side, but does mostly work…. Most of the time.
Rather, my issues are with their utterly dismal customer service. I’ve had one of their sales managers outright provably lie to me (claimed residential pricing was ex-vat & doubled down on it in writing when I quizzed them on it – This being despite the t&c’s on their own website saying otherwise) – No acknowledgement, much less an apology was ever forthcoming.
Likewise it took the better part of a year of continuous badgering to manage to get **actually** connected – Oh, and when we did due to some random ??? we ended up sharing login details with some random other person – Resulting in us kicking each other off our respective barely functional connections…. It took until “you’ve failed to fix it, come and take your defective connection away” on the final day of our cancellation-window for them to ACTUALLY bother doing anything about it.
In fairness their engineers seem fairly reasonable but they badly need to invest in a better call-center.
They boast 24/7 support front and center on ther website, but in reality it just goes to someone “on-call” at home when out of hours – Where you’re very much self-evidently being an imposition by bothering them (i once could clearly hear someone else evidently making dinner in the background when i rang at around ~7pm)
I’m currently writing this on the 4g on my phone because the connection died at ~8:30 – Pressing 1 for “out of hours” just results in being cut off.
As a general comment, the way they conduct themselves seems more like 3 children in a trenchcoat pretending to be an ISP, than an actual one. They are by far the worst outfit I’ve ever experienced in the last 20 years… and I include sky in that! (at least with them you’ve just got to suck it up and let them go through their script)
Even within office hours I’ve experienced more cluelessness than i did even from BT-retail… Nevermind the standard of service i’d expect from an actually worthwhile outfit such as Idnet or Claranet back in the day.
They’ve recently boasted on social media about how they’re expanding “full steam ahead”… IMO they badly need to put the brakes on and gear-up to handle the customers & infrastructure they’ve already got to a satisfactory standard before embarking on any more!
In their current state, i would not recommend them as an outfit to anyone. Alas, it seems CDS practically have shares in them as an outfit – I can only presume they view them as kindred spirits due to their matching levels of ineptitude!
As such they’ve skillfully replaced one monopoly, with a worse one & they’re essentially the only game in town for us either in terms of the current FWA or “actual fiber” when it supposedly arrives next year (I had a look at 4g, sadly it wasn’t really viable here)
We have had poor service from Airband for a while now but Monday night we lost internet altogether and now on Wednesday morning we still have nothing. They cannot tell me when or if it will be fixed and their support team is impossible to get hold of. They leave you waiting then play a message to say they can’t take your call but to leave your name and number and they will aim to get back to you ‘by the end of the following working day’ – which they never do. Only open 9am-5pm Monday to Friday which seems absurd for a broadband company and the out of hours support just tell you they are out of hours support and can’t help – so what’s the point?
I’m pleased and relieved to say that our service has been restored to full speeds over the last three days, and hope it will stay that way!
Airbad (not a typo) FWA service has been going down almost evey half hour in Shropshire. They are just plain awful, never respond to logged issues, never let you know what “mysterious thing” went wrong – they are a fraudulent scam company that has sucked up BDUK money but not delivered. We have been very badly let down by Connecting Shropshire who commissioned this shower.
I’d unfortunately have to agree that they’re basically a company. From the sales guys up it’s just one lie after another and if you love lying, you’ll get it in spades front their under qualified (read:cheap) support team when your connection is lost, which from my experience in north Devon is frequent.
As others have said good luck logging any call as too often their phone system puts you into a voicemail which they don’t respond to. Naturally only after they’ve kept you on hold for ages.
Their network status page is a joke as there’s nothing proactive about it as they appear to have to update it manually. This reflects a lack of proactive monitoring on their network where they seem to totally rely on customers to tell them when they have issues.
Luckily BT have started supplying services off the back of some recent openreach upgrades and I’ve already booked my switchover date.
Airband are certainly the worst isp I’ve ever had the misfortune to use but I feel blessed to be in a position to vote with my feet.
Goodbye airband, good riddance.