Airband's backer has walked away and its lenders are taking control

The investor behind rural broadband network Airband has stopped putting money into it. As reported by ISPreview, Aberdeen Group has agreed to hand control of the business to its lenders, and told the site it had made “the difficult decision to cease further funding” after weighing what Airband would need next against what it was likely to return. Bloomberg reported the handover first, behind a paywall. Aberdeen’s comment to ISPreview is the part anyone can read.

Airband sells broadband across rural parts of England and North Wales, using a mix of full fibre and fixed wireless. It has said its network reaches more than 440,000 premises in over 200 communities across seven counties, and ISPreview puts its customer base at around 30,000. Aberdeen has put more than £200m in. The company went up for sale in July and is still looking for a buyer.

If you are one of those 30,000, nothing announced this week changes your price, your contract or your connection. Airband has repeated the line it gave when the sale process opened: it continues to trade as normal, the network remains fully operational, and there is no impact on customer services.

All of that can be true while the accounts still look bad, and they do. ISPreview’s reading of Airband’s most recent accounts, to the end of 2024, shows revenue up 37 per cent to £6.67m against an operating loss of £47.23m, and total liabilities of £224.92m against total assets of £179.81m. Staff numbers had fallen from 451 to 285. An equity investor choosing to walk away rather than fund the next stage is a judgement about a business, and it is fair to read it as one. We have watched the same pressure reach toob earlier this month and Fusion Fibre before that.

Lenders taking control is not administration, though, and the difference is most of the story. ISPreview draws the comparison with Gigaclear, whose lenders took over earlier this year and accepted a large write-down on the debt in the process, and which is still selling broadband today. Lenders in control can restructure the debt, keep the business running, or sell it. A sale is still what Airband says it wants. A network changing hands is not a network switching off.

So there is nothing an Airband customer needs to do today. If the uncertainty is enough to make you look around anyway, our guide on whether altnets are safe to switch to goes through what actually happens to your line when a small network changes owner, and the availability checker is the only thing that knows what else reaches your street. The real unknown is what the lenders do with the debt, whether a buyer is close, and what either means for new building in rural areas Airband had already turned its focus away from. Nobody has said.