Grain Reveal Next 9 UK Towns and Cities for Gigabit Broadband

Broadband ISP Grain has today published the next batch of 9 UK towns and cities – including some inner-city areas of existing builds – where they expect to roll out their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which includes places such as Luton and Seaham.

The provider, which is being supported by an equity investment of £75m from Equitix (here), has already announced deployments for parts of Hull, Leicester, Liverpool, Accrington, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Scarborough, Carlisle, Barrow-in-Furness, Hartlepool, Newport, Sunderland and Blackburn. A further 11 locations were then added to this list at the end of last year (here), which was followed by 8 more in January 2022 (here).

Today’s announcement is said to bring the total number of towns and cities in their UK rollout plan to 43 and the “first phase” of their network roll out will thus cover 400,000 premises with full fibre broadband over the next few years.

As with prior updates, the press release doesn’t state how many premises will be reached in each new location or how long the individual builds will take to complete (an overall date of 2026 has been mentioned before). Much like other operators, Grain will also face competitive from gigabit-capable broadband rivals in some of these locations.

Grain’s Latest 9 UK Build Locations (May 2022)

Birmingham Sparkbrook

Birmingham Bearwood

Burnley

Leicester Newfoundpool

Liverpool Anfield

Luton

Manchester Abbey Hey

Newcastle Benwell

Seaham

The eagle eyed among you will probably notice that Burnley was already announced as part of their December 2021 list, so we’re assuming that its inclusion above could be a mistake. The December update also named “Birmingham” more generally, so we’re in two minds about the need to then announce specific areas within the same city, as it seems unnecessary.

Tracy Karam, Grain’s Head of Customer Experience, said:

“Uptake in residents signing up for our service has been at an all-time-high. Our service has become more popular recently given the rising cost in living crisis and our commitment to no unfair pricing tactics and never raising our customers in-contract prices as part of our Loyalty Price Promise.”

Customers of the service, once live, can expect to pay from just £17 per month for a symmetric speed 50Mbps package on a 12-month term (£25 thereafter), which goes up to just £29.99 for their top 900Mbps plan (£49.99 thereafter). All of these packages come with unlimited usage, free installation, router and a pledge to ensure “no in-contract price rises.”