Alternative broadband ISP Airband, which was aiming 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, appears to have quietly introduced symmetric speeds to their fibre packages for new customers. New subscribers can also get 6 months of free service.
Until recently the provider only offered asymmetric speeds, which for example meant that their 150Mbps package came with a slower upload rate of 50Mbps, while their top 900Mbps tier offered an upload of 200Mbps. But one of ISPreview’s readers (credits to William) helped us to spot that they recently upgraded their full fibre plans to offer symmetric speeds at no extra cost (i.e. same top speed both ways).
In addition, Airband recently started running an early Black Friday discount that offers the first 6 months of broadband service for free to new customers, which applies to both their FTTP and FWA packages – this makes for a significant cost saving.
A spokesperson for Airband told ISPreview:
“We introduced the change in early September and are working to migrate existing customers to symmetrical speeds. Any customers who are wanting to upgrade their speeds can give us a call and the team will implement for them.”
The operator currently claims to have brought “superfast connectivity access” to 315,000 UK premises in over 200 communities across 7 counties (here). But we believe this reflects 230,000 RFS premises (Ready for Service) and combines both their wireless and full fibre deployments (they also have 19,000 customers). We think upwards of 220k premises from that 315k total are being catered for solely by FTTP.
The latest move could perhaps 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).