ISP Grain Breaks Own Record with 29 Minute UK FTTP Broadband Install
Alternative broadband ISP and network builder Grain (Grain Connect) claims to have broken their previous home installation record of 36 minutes (here). The event occurred yesterday after a new customer signed-up and had a brand-new Full Fibre (FTTP) broadband service installed into their home in just 29 minutes.
The operator’s full fibre network currently covers 220,000 premises (21st May 2024) across parts of 59 UK locations (and over 150 new build housing developments), which includes a lot of small-to-modest sized patches of various urban areas like Leicester, Liverpool, Accrington, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Scarborough, Carlisle, Barrow-in-Furness, Hartlepool, Newport, Sunderland, Bolton, Blackburn and so forth. The operator also has 30,000 customers.
However, in terms of installation times, it’s worth remembering that there can be many different variables to consider depending upon the state of the local network, which makes it difficult to do a general comparison between operators. For example, some homes that have ONTs (optical modems) pre-installed for the same network could technically be remotely provisioned in seconds. But in reality it would still take slightly longer as you also have to boot the customer’s router up to establish a live link and WiFi etc.
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Suffice to say, it’s important to give some context to Grain’s previous installation and their latest personal record. The 36 minute (original) installation was for one of their urban premises (a house, not a flat), where they had no infrastructure already in place inside the customer’s property (only outside in the street). The 36 minutes thus covered the following process:
1. The customer calling into our sales team, selecting their package and completing the order.
2. Creation of a work pack that was issued to an engineer.
3. Engineer attending the customer’s home and bringing a new fibre line into their home, terminating the fibre in the home and connecting up the router.
4. Connecting the broadband line to a port in our electronics and configuring the broadband service on the router.
5. Engineer testing the customer connection to ensure the service is working.
6. Tidying up and leaving the customer premises with a brand new working full fibre broadband service.
Doing all that in just 36 minutes really does require the most ideal of circumstances and we should point out that Grain also has a different definition of ‘Ready for Service’ (RFS) from some other operators. For example, Openreach and some other PIA based providers define a home RFS where they have a live service either in a chamber or at the top of the pole somewhere near the premise, which can sometimes be over 100 metres away.
By comparison, Grain define a home RFS when they have a live network to the boundary of the premise. It costs Grain about £200 to connect customers in a property (including the costs of marketing to acquire the customer and the in-home router), which compares with c.£300 for Openreach (excluding marketing and an in-home router).
So, with all that in mind, it’s interesting to note how Grain has just informed ISPreview that they’ve managed to beat their previous time and deliver a new service within just 29 minutes (it was the same type of install as the last one). The event took place in Oldham, where install engineer Samantha completed the install for new customer, Rebecca. The Grain sales, provisioning and technical support teams then facilitated the sign-up, scheduled the installation, and configured the router – going from sign-up at 16:40 to service activation at 17:09.
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Richard Cameron, CEO of Grain, said:
“Our customers are at the heart of everything we do. For too long customers have endured long delays to have broadband installed in their homes. At Grain, we have chosen to build our own independent infrastructure, rather than renting the Openreach network. This enables us to deliver for our customers in a way no other provider can match. To do this in just 29 minutes is a testament to our efficient connection process and dedicated team.
While other providers deal in days or weeks, at Grain we deal in minutes.
We strive to deliver exceptional service, offering the lowest prices and the fastest installations, and I am extremely proud of the team for delivering this.”
The catch here is that, as good as this is, it won’t matter much unless you’re lucky enough to be in the minority of premises covered by Grain’s network. Most other network operators normally take several days (lead times of around 1-2 weeks are not uncommon) and of course Grain’s other installs will be slower than this (the operator notes that this will be a hard record for them to beat).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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It’s great that they are pushing the message of rapid installs, but I’m struggling to believe that this sort of install can be done safely and without cutting corners unless the engineer tasked for it is literally sitting round the corner from the premises when sent the job pack.
If you factor in, say, 10 minutes for the sales call that leaves 19 minutes for the engineer to receive and read the job pack, drive to the site, pull/blow the cable to the premises, drill the wall, mount the CSP and feed in the internal fibre, splice the fibre, mount and provision the ONT and set up/provision the router. All while tidying up after themselves as well.
That seems a very tall order to be done safely.
most likely, they only over between 5-20 roads in any given city they occupy so there engineers must waiting for the calls.
Probably just around the block, grain never does more than a handful of roads wherever they rollout
There’s a hell of a lot of assumptions in this comment. You assume that Grain operate just like OR. You assume their network build and install processes are similar to OR. You fail to consider automation, efficiency and an entirely different way of doing things. You and others, jump to conclusions without any degree of knowledge of how Grain operate. But base your assumptions on the antiquated and inefficient methods of others. Broaden your mind sir. There is another way.
If they can honestly take an order , complete the paperwork, create a job pack in 29 minutes , dispatch the technician , who then drives to site , introduce themselves, explain what’s to be done and then actually do it , that means the order takers are sat around doing nothing , the job pack producer is sat around doing nothing , the tech is sat in his or her van doing nothing , all praying that an order comes in before the redundancy notice , far from being a good news story this is abject failure writ large
Alternative point of view, the whole thing after placing the order is automated and the customer lucked in to an installation engineer being local and having just completed another job in less time than predicted. I wonder what their typical lead time is.
There won’t be any such thing as a job pack, it would be a simple case of is this address serviceable on our database. Yes it is, book an install. Just in this situation the booked it for more or less that instant and had somebody close by
Great – they get fibre in 29 minutes, while millions of us will still have to wait years. I know things are happening rapidly now, but we didn’t kick the FTTP rollout into gear until far too late in Britain.
…….that’s because we’ve become good at being bad.
I won’t be getting fibre before 2026
Sorry. We will put everyone back on copper until you can get it.
So because take-up is so slow there’s no queue to join and they’ve got staff sitting around waiting for an order to come in.
I don’t think Grain’s marketing team have thought this one through.
My initial impression was this might have been a fortuitous set of circumstances where potentially an engineer sold a neighbour on taking their service and was literally next door and didn’t have a call booked in after that install.
It seems not everybody is concerned about doing work before the 14 day cooling off period.
I thought the 14 day cooling off period was once the service was live not pre installation?
For a service the cooling off periods starts the day after you place the order. (The rules for goods are different.) This is why many ISPs will not schedule an install/migration to take place within 2 weeks of you placing an order.
How can this be possible?
So they are saying from a customer ordering to been live 36 minutes later, what about time for the engineer to travel to the customer from the office?
Engineer already doing install next door and Starts install in parallel while customer completes order on phone perhaps?
Can’t believe how excessively negative this site is to this company. Every article the same negative tone and idiots in the comments wishing on them redundancies.There was a time when people used to cheer on the underdog.
Well said, I’m with grain and I did have loads issues at the beginning but now I’m coming to the end of my 18 months and it’s been very reliable and a good price.
Lots of BT fanboys and BT shareholders here. I agree with you.,
I try to support the smaller companies, if it don’t cost me a small fortune, like a lot of people I still have to watch what I am spending.
Some years ago, I tried out a wireless network that a local company started, It is a shame it did not work out, and they could not cope with the influx of customers. I went to FTTC after the two years contract due to them not being able to cope. They closed a few months after that. Such a shame, it was a good idea and if they could have coped was a good alternative.
Now a lot of us have that alternative, ok so a lot of these alt nets are propped up by large companies, but fair play to them for doing what they are doing and at least giving the people the choice from Openreach and in some places Virgin.
Also a lot of these altnets have a better network than Openreach.
I am going to recontract with Zzoomm for another 12 months, not sure if I am staying with 500Mb.s or going down to 150, at the end of the day it is only another fiver a month for the 500Mb/s and can’t get much for a fiver these days. I suppose I can almost two pints, as beer is cheap here in some places.
I can only imagine the property had previously been served so the feed was already in existence. Any real world install that requires external cable to be provided into the property is going to bust that time with ease.
They have very small patches of coverage, from what I can see in my city there is two completed patches of a few roads each, to drive from one patch to the other unless rush hour is probably circa 10 mins, and if the job is in the same patch you probably looking at a couple of mins max.
That is pretty impressive, very impressive to be honest.
I wonder how many people they had to install it? Zoomm had two when they came here and took them less than an hour, granted some of that was chatting to me and getting a hole though the house wall did not go smoothly, took a bit of time. The bloke was out of the van, as soon as it stopped, got the ladder and fibre out, and up the pole before you could say Jack Robinson and the woman was looking at where I wanted the ONT, not that i really had much choice 🙂
There is not a single chance in hell this story is true. When I had Grain installed he was here for 5 hours. And he wasn’t sitting around chatting. There is nothing strange about my installation. It took him 30mins just to drill and install the mounting bracket onto the wall for the router and fibre terminus box. As you need to use a wall tester machine make sure there are no pipes/cables where he was drilling.
5 hours, what was he doing?
sure he needs to check the wall, but drilling a hole don’t take long, depending on the wall, if the cable is from the pole then just drag it across to the house and secure it, the ONT a couple of screws to secure it to the wall, connect it altogether and if the job is done at the other end, you should have broadband.
The only thing extra to do when I had mine installed was to sort out the speed, they did that by logging into the ONT, I presume and as they were changing it with their phone.
5 hours seems to be a very long time, even Openreach don’t take the long normally, but they do seem to have a load of vans and people to do it.
Grain do not follow overhead cabling. It is all inground. So he needed to dig up my garden to run the cable through from the street terminal. This took the bulk of the time. About 3 hours. Two final hours drilling and splicing the cable (it took him an hour to splice the cable as the tests kept failing). He also had to go down the street junction box to turn it on for my house. Phone up grain to enable my router and so forth. There is no way he could do all of that in 29mins. It is impossible. It took him 10mins on the phone just to enable my router.
@Anthony, Some of Zzoomm cabling is underground, I see the little Toby Boxes in a few places including the road a couple of roads down from me, so I don’t know why some are from poles and others are underground. Just glad my was from a pole. Is all Grain inground?
Not great that they had problems getting you connected, but these things do happen, a mate who has Zzoomm, also had some problems with them getting it working to start with.
When mine was put in, they plugged my router in and it worked, as I said, the only thing they had to do was adjust the speed, which is strange as I thought that would have been done elsewhere. Unless it was, and they were not connected to my ONT at all. The bloke just kept reading out the speed as it went up.
To be honest all this superfast installation is just a gimmick, I rather them go a bit slower and do a decent job, i understand that they have others to install and no doubt on a bit of a time limit, but I don’t know what they are trying to prove.
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In this case I’m guessing it was a door to door sales call. Customer was in – signed up and a tech happened to be near by with no work assigned.
Grain are fed from toby boxes outside of the premises. The cable has already been pulled
and in most cases there should be sufficient cable from to reach the front room of the house. In this case I’m guessing it was a terrace – straight from the Toby up into the front room. The cable should then be pre connected back to the cabinet and a simple red light pen should be enough to identify it and patch it to openreach dark fibre.
It’s quite plausible to install it within this time, however adding capping, cleaning up, demonstrating to the sub will all take additional time.