Broadband ISP Grain to Expand its Bradford Full Fibre Network

Alternative network operator Grain (Grain Connect) has announced that they’re going to expand the coverage of their existing gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based UK broadband network in the West Yorkshire (England) city of Bradford, although the details of their expansion remain unclear.

Grain’s network currently covers over 220,000 UK premises and connects 30,000 customers. The deployment they have in Bradford is currently limited to three large areas across the western side of the city, and at the time of writing we couldn’t find any obvious signs of a major expansion (we suspect it may be a smaller build, but Grain haven’t provided any specifics).

Bradford is actually one of Grain’s oldest FTTP deployments (it was announced in 2021), and the city is also home to several other gigabit-capable network operators with major levels of coverage, including Openreach, CityFibre, Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre), Brsk (Netomnia). Not to mention a small build by Hyperoptic. But the picture for overbuild is very patchy, and some pockets do remain poorly served.

Otherwise, Grain’s full fibre network can now be found in parts of around 60 UK locations (plus over 150 new build housing developments), which includes a lot of small-to-modest sized patches of various urban cities and towns like Leicester, Liverpool, Accrington, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Scarborough, Carlisle, Barrow-in-Furness, Hartlepool, Hull, Newport, Sunderland, Blackburn and so forth.

Prices for Grain’s broadband packages start at £17.99 per month for 150Mbps (symmetric speed) and rise to £28.99 for their top 900Mbps+ tier, which includes a 24-month minimum contract term, a pledge of “no in-contract price rises“, no credit checks, free installation and an included wireless router. The ISP is currently offering the first 2-4 months of service for free to new customers (offer length varies between packages).