Grain Spotted Building FTTP Broadband in Weston-Super-Mare

Broadband ISP and UK digital infrastructure builder Grain appears as if it will shortly add the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset (England) to their rollout plan for a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network. The operator is currently building across 43 towns and cities.

The provider, which is 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) and 9 in May 2022 (here).

However, it looks as if the provider will soon be adding Weston-super-Mare to their rollout plan too, after one of our readers (credits to Msh of the excellent Better Internet Dashboard) spotted some build plans for the town (e.g. expanding out widely from around the BS23 3EA postcode area). We confirmed this via the provider’s own website checker and have also contacted Grain, although they’ve yet to respond.

Customers of the service, once live, can expect to pay from just £25.99 per month for a symmetric speed 100Mbps package on a 12-month term, which goes up to just £49.99 for their top 900Mbps plan. All of these packages come with unlimited usage, free installation, a router and a pledge to ensure “no in-contract price rises.”

Grain has made a habit out of targeting areas where there is likely to be plenty of competition from gigabit-capable broadband networks in the future, and Weston is no exception. The town is already well covered by Virgin Media’s network and Openreach are also rolling out FTTP in the area.

On top of that, CityFibre has a big build going on in the town, although they’ve not made as much progress as we would have expected, particularly given that their local rollout was confirmed some time ago (here). You can also find a deployment from OFNL in one small area of new build homes. Otherwise, both Gigaclear and Truespeed also exist just outside the town, but neither has said they’ll enter the main urban area.

The town is a good example of how rapidly things can change, since not so long ago the only option for many locals would have been a significantly slower and less reliable FTTC service. But there’s still a lot of building left to go before everybody in the area can benefit from the new full fibre networks.