Rural UK Broadband ISP Airband Launch New TV Campaign

Alternative broadband operator Airband, which aims to cover 400,000 premises in rural parts of Wales and South West England via a mix of fixed wireless access (FWA) and full fibre (FTTP) networks by 2026, has done something that we don’t often see from Altnets by launching a TV campaign to promote their service.

The TV ad, which will be shown in parts of the country where Airband has a presence, features the voiceover of BAFTA award-winning comedy actor Charlie Cooper characterised as a duck who is comparing life in the countryside with the conveniences of living in a city to help highlight Airband’s connectivity solutions for rural communities.

The announcement states that Airband has already brought “superfast connectivity access” to over 315,000 premises in over 200 communities across 7 counties. This is the same figure that majority shareholder, abrdn, promoted in March 2024.

However, it’s worth noting that this reflects 230,000 premises as Ready for Service (RFS) and combines both their wireless and full fibre deployments (they also had 19,000 customers). We think upwards of 220k premises from that 315k total are being catered for solely by FTTP.

James Hyland, Head of Marketing at Airband, said:

“For too long communities and businesses outside of major cities have had to put up with little to no broadband provision. Airband changes all of that, our funny and slightly tongue-in-cheek campaign shows that we understand that country life is very much like city life, just with a better view!.”

Ordinarily, the launch of a new TV ad campaign wouldn’t be particularly interesting, which is partly because most of those come from the major providers and are thus part of routine. But it’s much less common to see smaller players putting in the not insignificant investment to do something similar, although Gigaclear did do one in 2022 (here).

The move will be seen as part of Airband’s efforts to improve take-up of their service(s), which follows after a period of restructuring that disrupted some builds and caused redundancies (here and here). But since then, the operator has been able to secure additional investment from abrdn to “accelerate rural broadband expansion” across the West of England (here).