Broadband provider Airband secures £100M debt facility to help bridge the rural-urban digital divide

Airband, a leading broadband provider for rural homes and businesses, has closed a significant £100 million debt package from an international banking consortium including HSBC and Lloyds, German bank Nord LB and Spanish bank Sabadell.

The debt facility enables Airband to accelerate its rollout plan with the view to service 600,000 premises with full fibre broadband by 2025.

The rollout of Airband’s full fibre broadband services will cover more than 10,000km of fibre in a bid to close the UK’s digital divide between urban and rural communities. Ofcom recently reported that people are living increasingly virtual lives, with data usage in the UK increasing more than 10 times from 2013 to 2019. Airband’s founder, Redmond Peel, said: “We created Airband in 2009 to supply rural areas with the high-quality internet they deserve. The pandemic has increasingly highlighted the deficit some communities in the UK face when it comes to services that those living in urban areas take for granted.

“Access to reliable and fast broadband that is fit for modern day lives – from home education and online grocery shopping during the lockdown through to the digitisation of many services, such as banking and streaming entertainment –can no longer be considered a luxury, but rather a basic utility.”