ISP Airband Make Progress on Full Fibre Build in Cheshire East
The Cheshire East Council in England has announced that UK ISP Airband has so far covered 3,000 extra premises with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, which forms part of a £4.5m state aid supported contract that was signed back in January 2021 (here) under the Digital Cheshire programme.
According to the original announcement, Airband’s contract aims to cover more than 4,100 homes and businesses in some of the county’s hardest to reach (e.g. rural) areas with full fibre technology, where commercial upgrades have failed to reach.
The 3,000 delivered to date thus represents an important achievement, although it’s worth noting that the contract’s original completion date was set as March 2023 and thus there’s a lot of work left to do before then. Malpas, Hampton Heath, Wrenbury and Ridley are just some of the towns and villages to benefit from this.
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Councillor Nick Mannion said:
“The difference ultrafast broadband makes to residents and businesses using online devices is transformational. For businesses working in rural locations or from home, it’s a significant boost in operations and productivity. For residential households it enables simultaneous streaming and gaming and increases the overall ability to connect and browse.
While recognising the great successes to date in enabling further connections, there is certainly more to come. We will continue to work with commercial providers in welcoming their roll-out plans across Cheshire. In partnership with Airband we will continue to deliver on our contracts to connect more rural properties, connecting communities through community fibre partnerships and providing access to voucher funding or those who wish to explore their own community-led scheme.”
Prices for Airband’s service start at £25 per month for a 40Mbps connection on their wireless network via an 18-month term, although the same money will get you speeds of 150Mbps on their full fibre platform and that goes up to £55 for their top 900Mbps tier. All with free installation.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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It’s not surprising that the local authority are in self-congratulation mode (it’s typical of Connecting Cheshire in general), but that does rather ignore the issues on the ground that have plagued this rollout.
My understanding is that they gave Airband two lists, “must do” postcodes, and “best endeavours” postcodes. That has grossly distorted the rollout, so disproportionate effort was made to reach some properties (often in areas with good 4G), while others have been ignored. We’ve seen hundreds of metres of new ducting and several new poles to reach a tiny handful of properties, while not covering those less than 100 m away and served by existing Openreach poles, but in the “wrong” postcode.
Airband failed to reach agreement with Scottish Power on pole sharing, so we have the absurd sight of brand new Airband poles being erected alongside near-new Scottish Power poles. It also makes fibre access a lot more difficult for the large number of properties served by shared poles. Presumably, they are covered by separate regulators, so nobody is banging heads together to enforce a sensible sharing.
Airband are also misleading in their coverage checker. If you live in the “best endeavours” area and register interest, you get an e-mail that says “You’re one step closer to ultrafast broadband! When the project is around 6 weeks from completion, a member of our friendly team will contact you to take your order.” It’s only when you chase them to see how it’s going that they admit that they are not actually planning to cover your address! Granted, no ISP offers 100% coverage, but from local experience, I doubt Airband are reaching half of what they claim are “in scope”.
Even a cursory check of social media in areas that they have connected shows a huge amount of local dissatisfaction with service reliability, non-existent customer service, and general quality of service.
Customers I know personally are regretting signing up and seriously considering going back to 4G, which may be slower, but is completely reliable.
I hope it all comes right in the end, but my feeling at the moment is one of a poorly planned rollout awarded to a company that’s expanded beyond its ability to support.
Residents of Malpas (pop 1700) and Wrenbury (pop 1180) might be amused to see their villages described as towns, as might the few dozen living in the hamlet of Ridley, a scattering of houses around a crossing of two major A roads!
Except it says “towns and villages” above, not only “towns”.
Can somebody tell me when it is likley that we get airband in Tiverton Devon
Our Airband journey took around 12 months. We were not part of the Cheshire role out
everyone else in our post code was but 4 houses were not included only a few hundred meters from the Cheshire funded zone. No idea why we were not included postcode lottery in action. BT wanted £130k to connected so we looked for other options.
We ended up using gigabyte vouchers and Airband extension. Lots of interactions with CWAC/Airband etc eventually it all came together. Two challenging issue was SP not letting Airband use their poles, they were replaced in 2020 so now we have two sets of brand new poles. BT use the SP poles, look like a Ofcom/Ofgem issue that needs sorting. Other issue was Airband don’t pay wayleave payments to farmers which is different to BT , no idea whey they don’t as the payments are quite small but the loss of good will is large.
Been running at 150mbps for two month now solid services.