Grain Expands UK Full Fibre Broadband to 236,000 Premises
Alternative UK network builder and broadband ISP Grain (Grain Connect), which has been gradually deploying a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, has revealed that they’ve now passed 236,000 premises (207k Ready for Service) and confirmed they have 28,000 customers.
The details were first released by CEO Richard Cameron at this week’s Connected North event in Manchester, and Grain were kind enough to share the slides (PDF) from that speech. Richard was sharing his thoughts on sustainably transforming digital connectivity and the growth of Altnets.
Grain’s full fibre network can now be found in 58 UK locations (plus 151 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, Blackburn and so forth. But they were recently hit by a few job losses and a “temporary” reduction in their network expansion as part of adopting a more regional build focus (here).
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The slides also highlight Grain’s low operating costs per customer, which are claimed to come in at around half the current benchmark of rival Altnets, although this is perhaps to be expected given Grain’s patchy approach to deployment. In any case, more detail is needed on the figures and methodology for this before we’d be able to correctly analyse it, and none of the rival Altnets listed are named.
Meanwhile, Thinkbroadband has informed that Grain’s latest RFS figure of 207k is much closer to their own estimate, which puts them at around 185k. TBB typically runs a bit behind live deployments due to the laborious process of tracking the latest changes, which when factored in would tend to lend some credibility to the provider’s coverage figures.
Customers of the service normally pay from just £18.99 per month for a symmetric 150Mbps package on a 24-month term, which goes up to just £25.99 for their top 900Mbps plan (take note that out-of-contract prices are £5 higher than this or more). All of these packages come with unlimited usage, free installation and a router. The ISP also has a social tariff for those on benefits.
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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And two outages last night totalling 1hr 15
People complain about other altnets being patchy and skipping their postcode (in reality just mad their house is not covered) meanwhile Grain is literally the most patchy altnet out there
The way they are building they have to be picky. Tightly packed terraces. Often the same ones CityFibre and the cable company built to.
58 Locations with 3 streets each.
58 cabinets with a 1G EAD and Mikrotik doing some NAT, see previous Grain ISPreview articles.
And don’t even think about accessing the router settings yourself!
I don’t understand. I have full access to my router on day one. The engineer showed me the details
Do they not lock down the Zyxel router like they do the Icotera?
I dont think it’s locked down. I can change every setting
Has anyone got the new Zyxel Wifi 6 router from Grain? What are their opinions on it if so?
It has pretty much everything a normal consumer would want. It can definitely provide good speed. Range may be an issue
When did they roll out the Zyxels?
Did wonder why they used Icotera only WiFi 5.
When WiFi 6 is norm.
So far they’ve been perfect. No issues and super cheap compared to the alternative
Combination lock on the street cabinet.
Have you seen the state of their cables into properties?
They’re absolutely shocking, probably not likely to last five years. They’re cheap for a reason.