Broadband ISP Grain Build UK Full Fibre Network into Burton-on-Trent
Alternative network builder and ISP Grain (Grain Connect) has informed ISPreview that their new gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network is to be rolled out in the East Staffordshire market town of Burton upon Trent. The first works are due to get underway this month.
The operator’s broadband network currently covers over 250,000 premises (RFS) across the United Kingdom and is home to 43,000 customers (data from the end of March 2025), which is up from 220,000 premises and 30,000 customers in May 2024. But despite the wider market pressures, Grain has managed to continue their roll-out and is expanding into new locations.
The new deployment into Burton is the latest example of that ongoing network expansion, and vaguely aims to cover “thousands of homes” across the town. As above, the first street works are due to begin this month (all of this is on underground infrastructure) and they’re then aiming to get the first customers connected by late summer 2025.
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Grain’s network is also present in a number of other Midlands towns and cities, such as Birmingham Wolverhampton, Leicester and Nottingham.
Richard Cameron, CEO at Grain broadband, said:
“We’re excited to offer Burton-on-Trent residents an internet service that can keep up with their digital lives.
We’re not just delivering faster internet; we are also saving customers a significant amount on their monthly broadband bill.
Whether you’re streaming your favourite shows, working from home or gaming, we’re helping to build a more connected Burton.”
Naturally, Grain will face some competition from gigabit-capable broadband rivals in Burton, which is already well covered by Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre) and has strong coverage from Openreach. In addition, ITS Technology has also deployed FTTP across much of the town, although off-hand we aren’t sure which residential ISPs are selling access to this part of their network (ITS tends to be more business-focused).
Finally, a number of altnets also have smaller scale deployments in the town, such as OFNL, Hyperoptic and FibreNest.
Grain’s Launch Deal for Burton
➤ Prices from just £19.99pm (150Mbps symmetric speeds)
➤ Up to 3 months free broadband for early sign-ups
➤ Free standard install
➤ Price freeze until 2027 – no sneaky in-contract price rises
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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I’m still lost at the economics of overbuilding other networks.
We have Openreach and Nexfibre live yet Grain are building. When the network goes live anyone who has FTTP won’t have finished their 2 year contract with their original provider.
Rajiv Datta of Nexfibre is on record as saying that he doesn’t believe more than 2 networks in any location is viable although Ofcom apparently want to end up with 3 national networks, the only way I can that working is if each network gets an even split of customers and I doubt that would be very likely.
Grain started in Weston-super-Mare. It’s not live in the few streets they dug. It gets expensive digging round other suppliers ducts in pavements.
burton has gained a lot of fibre over the last few years, openreach, VM02, connect fibre and now grain and supposedly youfibre is planned as well local areas surrounding burton also have fibreheroes.
Youfibre probably is an error. It’s been on and off for years. There is no announcement from them either so I would not bet on it.
Hopefully Grain inspire OR to stop dragging their feet around the other half of the town. The rollout has been very slow locally compared to the speed of VMs.
OR have been terrible they are half doing areas, half of hatton has been done and half of tutbury has been done