Air Fibre Broadband Review

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If you use your internet browser to search for the Air Broadband website, you’ll notice that it’s currently inaccessible. There’s no message stating the site is “under maintenance” or even a 404 error message, which states the home page doesn’t exist. It’s completely down.

This development may be puzzling to anyone who’s previously heard of Air Broadband and is wondering whether its service is any good. Thus, this Air Fibre Broadband review will attempt to provide some clarification on the matter. 

About Air Fibre Broadband

Air Broadband Limited was an internet service provider that was established in 2013. It was based in the Cambridge area of the United Kingdom and specialised in fibre broadband and TV packages (among other related services).

The company’s Facebook page states its mission was to “keep you connected always at speed and at value.” To that end, it aimed to deliver super-fast “gigabit-level speeds to as many households as we can.” It used the slogan “Simply Smarter Broadband” and, in one Facebook post, urged potential customers to “Choose Air Broadband and achieve more with your internet!”

Its LinkedIn profile description (which also states that the company is “no longer trading”) reads:

“Air Broadband full fibre broadband service connects communities with speeds of up to 1Gbps, and that can make your home – SMART! Air Broadband provides services to customers throughout the UK.

Air Broadband is renowned for the quality of our customer support and has a great range of low-cost services from 100Mbps - 1000Mbps upload and download speed for any home or business.” 

We’ll come back to the above passage when we discuss the company’s customer service below.

In late 2022, Zybre, another broadband provider, bought the company. Currently, Air Broadband’s parent company has stopped taking new customers.

When you’re through with the article, consider checking out our list of best broadband providers to find an alternative.

Coverage

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By the time the company closed down, Air Broadband had roughly ten employees. That headcount is minuscule, considering it tried to expand its services throughout the UK.

However, the brand had nine years between when it was founded and acquired to expand its operations across the country. Judging by its frequent announcements of new coverage areas, like the one on this Facebook page, Air Broadband got busy.

By the way, if you’re not sure whether your area has fibre, consider using our fibre checker to find out.

Customer Satisfaction

As of the time of writing, Air Broadband has a one-and-a-half star rating (out of five) on Trustpilot. While it's not exactly zero stars, the low rating indicates that its subscribers weren’t satisfied with its service.

However, before we draw conclusions, is it worth getting a second opinion elsewhere?

Air Broadband seemed to think so while it was still open for business. In the “About” section of its Trustpilot page, Air Broadband left the following message:

“Please note that Air Broadband does not manage or monitor this platform. We do not believe the cost or algorithms of Trustpilot to be an accurate reflection of the service we offer.”

The company went on to direct readers to another website called Feefo, where it claimed they could find “up-to-date reviews of our service.”

The Air Broadband Feefo page the company referred curious searchers to has 105 reviews. When you set the filters to “All Reviews” and sort the results “By Oldest,” you’ll see that the earliest reviews (which arrived in 2021) are more positive. That’s encouraging, if hardly up-to-date.

Still, whose word do we take? Feefo’s or Trustpilot’s?

To answer this question, we used similarweb to compare Trustpilot and Feefo’s respective statistics. 

Our research revealed that Trustpilot’s website ranks 1,129 globally in comparison to Feefo’s 59,899. Similarly, Trustpilot has a much larger visitor metric, enjoying 55.4 million total visits. In contrast, Feefo has 1.1 million total visits. Thus, we feel Trustpilot’s reviews are more reflective of consumers’ opinions on Air Broadband’s service.

The above notwithstanding, it’s still too early to definitively state that Air Broadband’s subscribers weren’t happy with its service. The reason will become clearer in a subsequent section.

Internet Speed

Source: DepositPhotos

Air Broadband claimed its fibre connection offered speeds that were up to 10 times the UK average, which, according to a gif on their Facebook page, is 104.04mbps. 

In July 2022, the company rolled out its Air 200 broadband package in the Norwich area. Its Facebook announcement of the launch claimed Air 200 “boasts download and upload speeds of 200Mbps - almost three times the average in the area.”

While we can’t verify whether the above statement is accurate, we can rely on the reviews on Trustpilot. 

One of the many reasons some subscribers get fibre broadband is for online gaming. It requires fast internet speeds to avoid latency and other issues.

A positive Trustpilot review, posted in October 2022, had the following to say about its internet speeds:

“Now i can enjoy better online gaming and not die so much on call of duty lol.”

Another positive review, posted in February 2022, reads:

“Great service. Very simple and easy to order. Speeds are good, when testing on an ethernet connection it is well over the 500Mbps that I am supposed to be getting. On Wi-Fi it is also pretty good, but obviously lower than ethernet (which is to be expected). Would certainly recommend.”

What the above reviews tell us is that some subscribers found Air Broadband’s internet speeds satisfactorily fast. If you pay attention to the dates when these subscribers posted their reviews, you’ll see that they fall before Zybre’s acquisition of Air Broadband acquisition by Zybre. 

Speaking of internet speeds, consider using our Speed Checker the next time you need to check how fast your internet is.

Customer Service

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Contrary to the company’s claim of being “renowned for the quality of our customer support,” the Air Broadband reviews on Trustpilot seem to indicate that it offered bad customer service. 

As the statistics on its Trustpilot review page show, Air Broadband responded to only six of the 53 negative reviews it received on the platform (approximately 11%). 

The above response ratio isn’t indicative of a company that takes customer service seriously. 

However, those stats alone don’t paint the full picture.

To accurately review its customer service, we looked at Air Broadband’s Trustpilot company activity page. The graph in the “Reviews Over Time” section of the page shows that former subscribers posted the bulk of reviews a few months after the company was sold.

The highest number of reviews (22) poured in around February 2023, roughly three months after Air Broadband closed its doors. The second-highest number of reviews (15) arrived a month later before trickling off in subsequent months. 

What we gathered from this data is that most of the negative reviews the company received came in after it shut down. This tells us that, prior to closing, the company’s customer service could’ve been much better. Also, Trustpilots data concludes that they responded to negative reviews in “2 weeks or less.”

Oddly, as of February 2023, customer service reps from the company were still responding to negative reviews. This information seems to explain the low response to negative reviews ratio mentioned above. 

But that’s not all; some reviews reveal that the company could be dodgy about its customers’ well-being in some cases. One particularly irate customer, who posted a review in April 2023 after Air Broadband shut down, had this to say:

“Echoing everything else from the reviews about the customer service but will add that despite having our service cancelled as they no longer provide broadband, they've continued to attempt to take payment for now two months after. DO NOT get involved with these clowns.”

Plans and Pricing

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Since Air Broadband doesn’t exist anymore, it’s challenging to talk about the company’s broadband plans and prices. 

However, based on our research, it's clear that Air Broadband aimed to provide the best deal to its customers. As this Facebook post reveals, the company offered a range of affordable plans. One such plan was its Air 200 service, which started at £28. 

Other plans seemed to be even cheaper, as some of the positive Trustpilot reviews reveal. One happy ex-subscriber posted the following in December 2022:

“Router arrived on time, installation of fibre took 30 mins. Worked first time. Had a glitch which they presumably fixed from their end. All in all a good job. Only £20 if on benefits.”

What we concluded from our research is that Air Broadband was one of the cheapest providers of broadband when it was still running.

Final Verdict

In its heyday, it's possible that Air Broadband provided an affordable and fast internet connection that many of its subscribers considered good value for money. However, the Trustpilot review data we combed through tells a different story.

Nevertheless, even though the negative reviews on Trustpilot dwarf the positive ones, it's important to bear in mind that the majority of them were posted after the company shut down its operations. The timing should tell most people that, in the company’s nine-year run, user sentiment wasn’t always sour.