Voneus paid £4.6m for Airband, the administrators’ report shows
The administrators winding up Airband have filed their report, and it puts a price on the rescue. Voneus paid £4.6m. That covered the whole thing, the rural network, its customers and the staff who run it, and it was the only offer on the table. ISPreview published the figures on 10 September.
The rest of the report is the scale of what went wrong. Airband went into administration carrying £312.3m of debt. ISPreview reports that the Aberdeen Group, which had been funding it, stands to lose more than £228.8m of secured debt on its own, having also written off its equity in the company entirely. HSBC was the biggest single lender at £81m and is due £4m back. Voneus’s shareholders put in a further £550,000 towards the costs of the administration. All 135 Airband employees moved across to the new owner under TUPE.
It happened fast. Airband told its lenders in June that Aberdeen could not keep funding the business. Administrators from AlixPartners were appointed on 27 August and the sale completed straight afterwards, which is how TheBusinessDesk reported it at the time. Only one bid was judged deliverable in the time available, and that bid was Voneus’s.
What it means if your line is an Airband line
Nothing about your broadband changes because a document was filed. The sale closed a fortnight ago and the customers went across with the assets, so the company responsible for your connection is Voneus either way. What the report adds is a number you did not have before. The network reaching your house was worth £4.6m to the only buyer who turned up, against £312.3m of debt run up putting it in the ground. Together the two networks now cover 170,000 gigabit-ready premises and about 60,000 customers, on ISPreview’s figures.
So what do you actually do? Read your contract, and check the price and the end date on it. A change of ownership does not rewrite terms you have already signed, and it does not on its own give you the right to walk away, which is the bit that catches people out. Where you stand when your provider is taken over is the page to read this week if this is you. And if it has you wondering what else reaches your street, the availability checker will tell you.
One thing we cannot tidy up for you. The losses here do not add up to a single headline number: the secured debt and the written-off equity are counted separately, and the coverage when the sale was announced put the backers’ loss at around £200m rather than the larger figure the report sets out. Take the individual figures rather than a total. And remember what a document like this is for. It tells creditors what they are getting. It says nothing about how the network gets run from here, which is the part that turns up in your bill and your installation dates over the next year. What happens to customers when an altnet fails is the longer answer, and Airband is now one of the clearest examples of it.