Administrators reveal financial details of Voneus’ acquisition of Airband
The administrators for alternative UK rural broadband network Airband, which was recently acquired by Voneus (full summary), have published a report that reveals the financial details of the deal. Strikingly, it states that Voneus, which was the only bidder, paid just £4.6m for the company’s assets and customers.
According to the administrators report, Airband had been struggling for a number of years and its attempts to restructure the business in 2024 did deliver improvements, yet the company continued to struggle with losses and cash consumption. The company ended up advising their Lenders in June 2026 that the Aberdeen Group was “unable to continue funding the business“, which we already know is what kicked off the sale process.
However, only a single offer was received that was deemed “capable of being delivered within the time available” (i.e. the Voneus offer) and this was accepted. The sale was then handled through an administration process, which resulted in a consideration of £4.6 million being paid in full on completion. The shareholders of Voneus also agreed to pay a contribution to the Company’s costs of £550,000. A total of 135 Airband employees have been transferred (TUPE) to the new owner.
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The amount of debt (creditors) attached to Airband before the sale was £312.3m and the Aberdeen Group stands to lose over £228.8 million in secured debt alone, alongside the total write-off of their equity investment. The company’s biggest lender (HSBC), which accounted for £81m of the total debt, will only get £4m back. The full report contains a lot more detail, but those are the headline figures.
Definitely not the sort of situation that other altnets will wish to repeat.
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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Porky pies fed to the press on the two hundred million loss. The administrators report does not include equity. Abrdn torched three hundred million of pension fund capital.
At the time of the administrative process, Aberdeen no longer held any equity in the business, having swapped equity for debt to facilitate the administrative process.
This is an illustration of what is likely to happen to those providers who have no prospects of becoming profitable or of establishing a sustainable business model.
When a business is laden with debt and has no way of progressing, the administrative process is the most equitable resolution. This particular closure is probably illustrative of what is to come for other providers who, after a similar administrative process, are likely to be found to be of little intrinsic value.
Aberdeen were a bit late to the party when they bought Airband, and I was rather surprised, considering Aberdeen dropped several UK tech companies and also various Funds beforehand with a lot more than £200M+ invested in them. However, rather proud that my Power BI dashboards were used to showcase the company to potential investors including Aberdeen. Airband was one of the better companies that I worked for and was really pleased they did their homework and enrolled us with a decent pension provider that is Royal London where I was getting over 30% performance a year excluding contributions. Sadly Voneus uses NOW as a pension provider and if I was an Airband employee that has moved across or if I was an existing Voneus employee, I would be asking Voneus nicely review their pension provider for a much better one. Clearly Voneus didn’t do their homework when it came to Pension providers…… The Tuped Airband employees should be able to transfer 90% of their new NOW pension every Qtr into the Royal London pension scheme with the advice of an IFA…
“Definitely not the sort of situation that other altnets will wish to repeat.” I’d say the chances are that they will are extremely high.
The numbers are brutal. The outcome effectively discounted the reported book value of the network infrastructure by around 97pc.