Rural UK Broadband Provider Airband Tops 30,000 Customers
Alternative internet provider Airband, which has built a mix of both Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) based broadband networks to cover various rural parts of Wales and South West England, has today announced that they’ve hit their target of reaching 30,000 customers (up from 19,000 in March 2024).
The brand’s 30,000th customer was connected in Wrexham, North Wales, which was one of the first areas to benefit from the rollout of Airband’s latest Gigabit Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) technology (this uses the 60GHz band). Speaking of which, the provider said they’re “already planning” to expand the reach of this new FWA technology during 2026.
The provider has previously stated that their network spans a total of “more than 440,000 premises in over 200 communities across 7 counties“ (here), which we were told breaks down as being 175,000 premises via “fibre” (FTTP) and 265,000 premises via wireless (FWA) – all Ready for Service. But they’ve also recently expanded FTTP into off-net areas by partnering with Openreach (here).
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Airband now serves rural parts of Devon, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire and north Wales and has most recently brought FTTP solutions to the village of Ewelme in Oxfordshire.
Kash Rahman, Airband CEO, said:
“This customer milestone is another proud moment, in what has been a great year for Airband. Our focus on innovating to serve country communities that have been left behind by traditional broadband rollouts is working both for the business and the audiences we serve. We are committed to being customer first and the best is yet to come!”
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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6.8% take up. 93.2% of potential customers would rather not use them. Very wise
“Airband is backed by investor abrdn, which has put over £200m into growing the business”. Just £6,666.66 pounds per customer then……
I wouldn’t use them if I had another affordable option, I’m glad I’m off Starlink but wish I was using an Openreach-ISP, but the only provide sub-20 Mb VDSL here.
Exactly right Dave. I would say that those numbers used to be much worse, over ten thousand a customer. It has improved. On the other hand, abdrns 200 million invested has accrued interest now. Possibly they’re standing still, will need to see the 2025 financial statements
So the highest paid director in year ending December 2024 was paid 302k plus 10k in pension contributions. Do the maths and work out how much that is per customer. Why are these CEO’s paid so much for achieving absolutely nothing? The Prime Minister gets far less for managing (allegedly) the UK.