RELIABLE BROADBAND, THE FOURTH EMERGENCY SERVICE?

Last year the national press was full of reports of a mass exodus of workers relocating away from Covid-ravaged cities to more rural areas.

Here the air is cleaner (unless it’s muckspreading season), the neighbours are arguably friendlier (and often a bit further away) and there’s more open space.

But with many rural households reportedly still getting speeds as little as 0.12Mbps (on which it could take more than two days to download a film), while the average nationwide download rate has risen from 54.2Mbps last year to 64Mbps, will the misery of computer buffering drive workers back to the towns and cities when the crisis has abated?

The government hasn’t helped the situation. Last year it revised its broadband target downwards, aiming to roll out gigabit broadband across just 85 per cent of the UK by 2025 rather than the 98 per cent it had originally promised.

It’s difficult to make money through renting out rural broadband provision, because laying the fibre is so expensive, so most broadband companies are targeting towns and cities first, building new broadband infrastructure from the “inside out”.

Not so Worcester-based Airband. The company was established 11 years ago by Black Country-born Redmond Peel who was already running a similar company in South Africa.

With BT dragging its heels in committing to the expensive installation of fibre into more rural towns and villages, in 2010 Airband decided to deploy its expertise closer to home.

“We began by rolling out broadband on business parks and into government buildings, including schools,” said Redmond.

Then Airband moved into in rural areas, first deploying microwave rather than fibre to connect people, because at that time there was no infrastructure. In fact, it was only able to begin rolling out rural fibre broadband at scale three years ago.

The company’s first government contract was in Hereford in 2011, for £65,000.

The next one was for £210,000. Since then, Airband has continually won multimillion-pound contracts from BDUK, part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

Redmond predicts that it won’t be until 2027-2033 when all homes will have fast, reliable broadband. He estimates that only around eight per cent of rural homes currently have good speeds.

“The government has put a lot of money into the programmes, but we just wish the rollout could be done faster. To be fair, it has had to push back some spend because it can’t find enough companies like ours who have the expertise to lay broadband into the more rural areas.”

Investing in the future

If the bigger companies have abandoned rural fibre broadband installations because it’s too expensive, where is Airband getting its funding from?

Its first major investment was in 2018 when Amber Infrastructure secured a substantial minority shareholding in the company. Last year, global asset manager Aberdeen Standard Investments acquired a majority stake in the business, worth hundreds of millions.

Redmond said: “Aberdeen believes in the long-term viability of private fibre. And thanks to their investment we can now build much more quickly to roll out networks across our key six counties. We want to transform connectivity for individuals and communities who deserve better.”

Airband invested £20 million building fibre networks in 2020 and is looking to spend £45 million this year. It will be years before that turns into regular income, but as Redmond observes, it’s no different to building a hotel. “A company will spend years on the build, and only start receiving a return when it can rent out the rooms.”

The business currently employs around 250 people and its growth will drive the employment up to 1,000 workers across the South West by the end of next year.

“We will lay more than 3,000 km of fibre this year, generally down rural roads,” said Redmond.

The company is currently focussed on Worcestershire and Herefordshire, Avon and Somerset, Shropshire and Cheshire. It plans to move into Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire after that.

“We operate in areas where communities have been campaigning for years,” said Redmond. “Take Welland at the foot of the Malvern Hills. It’s a scattered village with around 1,200 residents. BT went to some of the bigger villages nearby during a previous government programme, but they got missed out, so we went in. Much Marcle in Herefordshire was another one. It’s only got a population of around 660. We have to lay a lot of fibre to reach a relatively small number of homes.”

So how can one small village persuade Airband to lay full fibre?

Get organised, and try and engage with neighbouring communities, advises Redmond. “Form a group and work together. Don’t just think about your village. The more people you can get together, acting as a community, the better.”

Not just for Netflix

If the pandemic has taught us anything it’s that reliable broadband is essential in the 21st century.

With more people working from home, physical retail and schools closed for months, poor rural broadband hampered students access to education, and arguably affected the quality of life of all those living in rural areas.

On average, people working from home with slow broadband speeds lose 40 minutes of productivity a day.

But reliable connectivity has the potential to improve lives. Airband is currently running a pilot looking at how broadband can be used by the NHS to monitor and support ill and elderly people in a rural environment.

Laying down new fibre and connecting households is only part of it. Demand for bandwidth soared during the pandemic. “On December 31, 2020 we used three times as much bandwidth as we did at beginning of that year and we added more customers to the network,” said Redmond.

“You can’t just add extra capacity to your network overnight. We had to lease more from the networks to get the extra bandwidth into each rural area village, and the networks had been flooded by demands from everyone else.”

Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report found that, in April 2020 during the height of lockdown, UK adults spent a daily average of four hours and two minutes online, with one in three watching online videos more than traditional TV.

It’s the day-to-day challenges of getting fibre into rural locations which keeps Redmond and his team of engineers motivated.

“There isn’t a day when we don’t have a new situation to challenge us. Every house is different. The communication infrastructure has gone in piecemeal over many decades. Luckily, we have some fantastic engineers, and every day bring a new puzzle to solve.”