Grain Building UK Full Fibre Broadband Network to Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire
Carlisle-based alternative broadband ISP Grain (Grain Connect), which has already built their point-to-point full fibre (FTTP) network to cover 270,000 UK premises (aiming for 600,000 in the future) and in 2025 secured a £225m funding boost (here), has now been spotted deploying their network in the Lincolnshire (England) town of Scunthorpe.
At present homes and businesses in Scunthorpe, which is home to a population of around 81,000, already have wide access to three gigabit-capable broadband networks via Openreach, Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre) and MS3. In addition, there’s also a small bit of more business-focused full fibre coverage from ITS Technology. Suffice to say, it seems like a risky bet for an altnet like Grain.
Despite this, one of our readers (credits to mrpops2ko), who lives in the town, was recently notified by the provider that Grain are “currently … expecting to get you connected between September – December this year” and indeed it does now seem possible to place a pre-order in parts of the town.
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Grain has not yet made an official announcement about this deployment, although a quick check of local street works does confirm that the operator are preparing to build in the north of the town, initially around the Crosby area. No doubt Grain will shortly be making an official announcement about this.
The provider is currently offering pre-orders with prices from £19.99 per month for 15 months (first 3 months free) for speeds of 250Mbps on an 18-month term, which rises to £29.99 for 2000Mbps on the same offer. The packages all come with a header that clearly states “Earliest install September 2026“.
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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Congratulations to the 4 streets that will be able to order it
Do these altnets ever actually research their markets? For example, Scunthorpe has just about full FTTP coverage from Openreach and MS3. Grain are also concentrating on building their network in the Northern part of North East Lincolnshire, which is also fully covered by Openreach and MS3. Yet the Southern parts of North East Lincolnshire (Humberston, New Waltham, Waltham, Hotlon Le Clay) have no FTTP coverage at all, with no future plans for FTTP from any provider either. Surely it would make sense to target these areas, as they would achieve much higher market penetration. But what do I know.