Grain Add Sheffield to UK Full Fibre Broadband Network Expansion UPDATE
Carlisle-based alternative broadband ISP Grain, which has so far built their point-to-point full fibre (FTTP) network to cover 270,000 UK premises (aiming for 600,000 in the future) and in 2025 secured a £225m funding boost (here), has issued a brief announcement to confirm that the South Yorkshire (England) city of Sheffield will be the next to get their network.
The choice of adding Sheffield, which is home to around 560,000 people, is an interesting one because the city already has a fair bit of access to gigabit-capable broadband networks by Openreach (BT), Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre) and CityFibre (although CF only covers around half of it). After that there’s some modest to smaller coverage from FullFibre Ltd (Zzoomm), Hyperoptic, ITS Technology, Pine Media and even some recent build from little-known Giggle Fibre (Giggle remains odd as they’ve still not put any services live after several years of building).
As usual, Grain hasn’t revealed precisely how many premises they intend to cover in the city or when their build will complete, although they do confirm that the “build begins soon, with first customers going live next year“. We’re actually a little surprised that the first customers won’t go live until next year, as it usually only takes Grain a month or two to start putting the first connections live after the build starts.
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Less of a surprise is the fact that, according to local street works data, their initial deployment focus will be around the Western side of the city in the Crookes area. This part of the city doesn’t have so many altnets to worry about, with Grain’s main competitors being the established players of Openreach and Virgin Media. Grain will no doubt be hoping that their lower cost approach to build and cheaper consumer pricing can disrupt the area in their favour.
UPDATE 9:25am
We did query the “next year” remark with Grain and they’ve confirmed it was an error. The first connections should actually be going live during Spring 2026.
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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Are this outfit issuing one statement per day to announce a new town or city in an attempt to always have a story on the front page of ISPreview?!
We aren’t the only news site that covers such developments, although as a PR strategy it’s not uncommon. Openreach, O2, Virgin Media and others often do piecemeal / drip feeding of updates for different things. Fair enough if it works, even though I’m not a particularly big fan of the approach. I much rather several areas be announced at the same time, rather than one by one.
Crookes is a strange area for them to start with. It’s mostly a student area, so if they can target that market (perhaps by targeting the student housing landlords to offer internet as an inclusive service, or offering contracts that run for a university year instead of 24 months) they might be able to get some business. If they go with the long-contract approach of most FTTP providers, they will struggle in that particular part of Sheffield.