Grain Adds Town of Nelson to UK Full Fibre Broadband Rollout Plan
Carlisle-based broadband ISP Grain, which recently secured a major £225m funding boost to continue their expansion (here), has today announced that they’ve added the Lancashire (England) town of Nelson – home to a population of almost 30,000 people – to their build plan for a new full fibre (FTTP) network.
Nelson is an interesting choice given the existing collection of networks. For example, both Openreach and Virgin Media (nexfibre) have already covered most of the area with gigabit-capable broadband. At the same time, Netomnia (Brsk) are known to be actively building in the town and IX Wireless also sells ultrafast broadband via their hybrid wireless network. The ITS Technology Group’s network is also present on a local business estate.
As for Grain, the announcement doesn’t reveal anything much about their deployment plan for the town, although we can see that they’ve already covered a few premises around the Vantage Court area. But other than that, we’re currently unable to identify any significant future build activity from them in the town, which will hopefully change over the coming days or weeks.
Advertisement
The operator’s FTTP broadband network is currently home to over 43,000 customers and covers 270,000 UK premises (aiming to reach 600,000 in the future).
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.
« Cross-Party Inquiry Finds UK Unprepared for Attacks on Subsea Fibre Cables
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person’s legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
2 towns announced in the last day or so and both already well covered by other networks. What do they know that we don’t? Seems like madness to me.
They have to spend the investors money somehow.
A few years ago Grain started in Weston-super-Mare. They put in one cabinet, with a combination lock, and dug a few roads. Nothing live. The town now has Openreach, Virgin Media and CityFibre.
Roadworks now says for the cabinet:
25 Sep ’25 07:00 to 29 Sep ’25 16:00
Work description
Remove cab base and reinstate footway to SROH
Promoter
Grain Connect
To my knowledge Grain only seem to cover new housing estates (I could be wrong).
I live just outside a major city and I can’t get fibre yet
They also build into existing areas. They were first to this Victorian terrace. They will likely build into parts of Nelson that are still FTTC (or Virgin coax).
are grain going after certain demographic and IMD decile areas? Are they more of a value offering provider?
All these Alt Nets simply cannot survive as they will never move into profit
Many areas now have 3 or more providers if they all get an equal share of the market its a third probably not enough to make a profit, In practice of course they will all not get an equal share
The market in my view has to consolidate
They didn’t bother finishing the build in Accrington and because they started no one else has over built here. Seems a poor decision to over build another town and leave Accrington half done.