Grain Puts FTTP Broadband Network Live in Saltburn, North Yorkshire
Alternative network builder and UK ISP Grain (Grain Connect) has announced that their new gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network has gone live in the North Yorkshire (England) seaside town of Saltburn (Saltburn-by-the-Sea), which is home to around 6,000 people.
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 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 still expanding into new locations.
Naturally, Grain will face some competition from gigabit-capable broadband rivals in the town, which is already well covered by Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre) and has strong coverage from Openreach too. But they won’t have to worry about any other altnets and their prices are low enough that they stand a good chance of being able to steal customers away from the established players.
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At present the operator appears to reach over 30% of premises in the town (guesstimate), but this is currently still in the process of being actively expanded.
Grain’s Launch Deal
➤ 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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Does this make Grain the largest Point-to-Point (P2P) style of FTTP provider in the UK by both coverage and customers?
I think Grain might have been a few months late here. Openreach FTTP went live here earlier in the year and I already see a lot of people migrated over to FTTP already. Certainly for my family in Saltburn they’ve already moved over to Openreach and didn’t have much interest in moving to Grain once their contracts are up.
Grain usually do door knocking which I know some people don’t like but it’ll make potential new customers aware. No price rise and competitive price is good.
Grain is by far one of, if not the worst, is there actually any town they are in where they actually provide a proper coverage and not just 10-20 roads?