Grain Adds 6 UK Towns and Cities to FTTP Broadband Rollout
Cumbria-based network operator and broadband ISP Grain (Grain Connect) has today named a further 6 UK towns and cities for their ongoing rollout of a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which includes some major locations like Leeds and Brighton.
The provider has already announced full fibre builds for over 50 locations (plus 150 new build housing developments), which includes major urban areas like Hull, Leicester, Liverpool, Accrington, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Scarborough, Carlisle, Barrow-in-Furness, Hartlepool, Newport, Sunderland, Blackburn and so forth. The initial phase of their rollout aims to cover 400,000 premises, although the timescale for this is unclear, and we still don’t know how many they’ve completed.
The latest six locations to be announced today include Leeds, Halifax, Castleford, Barnsley, Gillingham and Brighton. Practically all of these new locations are, much like before, already highly competitive due to the presence of gigabit-capable rivals, although such concerns have never stopped Grain before.
However, we have noticed that, at least in some of their locations, Grain appears to be targeting the patches that have yet to be covered or which have only been covered by one other competitor. This may help to illuminate some of their strategy, but we fully expect more operators to overbuild as time goes on.
Tracy Karam, Head of Sales and Marketing at Grain, said:
“It’s a really exciting time for us and we are continually buoyed by the feedback we are receiving from our customers. We are raising the bar with our service and pricing, especially our commitment to no in-contract price rises and competitive pricing for our current and future customers.
Residents in the new areas we are targeting; Leeds, Halifax, Castleford, Barnsley, Gillingham and Brighton are already lining up to make the switch to Grain broadband, taking advantage of our fast and reliable service and great monthly offers. We are on an exciting journey and customers up and down the UK are benefitting, as they jump from their old providers to Grain.”
Customers of the regular service, once live, normally pay from just £25.99 per month for a symmetric 100Mbps package on a 12-month term (currently discounted to £17.99), which goes up to just £49.99 for their top 900Mbps plan (discounted to just £29.99). All of these packages come with unlimited usage, free installation, a router and a pledge to ensure “no in-contract price rises.” 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 and Linkedin.
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The most random rollout award
Their strategy seems to be a mix of 40% City Fibre overbuild and 40% Netomnia overbuild
Nice! L)
They obviously feel confident they can take business away from their competitors in many areas that are already covered with Cityfibre and Openreach FTTP as well as Virgin
They even rolled out in an area near here that has CityFibre, Virgin Media AND Openreach FTTP.
A strange direction to go in when there are other areas in the region that have no FTTP at all yet, even more so when you consider the area I mention above is mostly student housing, so most will be going with the cheapest provider they can get and only want a 12 month term.
They are actually very cheap. They undercut Cityfibre by a significant amount and are literally asking for half that of Openreach. Only downside is its CGNAT thus console gaming will be dreadful with them. Their website says they have plans to release IPv6. When they do this will be a bargain FTTP provider.
How long can they be cheap for? Moving into towns with multiple FTTP options means they’re a price taker with a sizeable risk of high churn, and as at their last accounts they already had almost £10m of accrued losses on their balance sheet, and were losing money at the rate of £4m a year. So far investors have continued to pour the money in to keep the company solvent, but eventually the company needs to be financially sustainable.
Bargain basement prices are only a route to success if a company has some magic sauce that means their cost to serve is lower than the rest of the market, and that’s very, very rare. It does sometimes happen that somebody comes up with a new operating model (eg back in the day easyjet, First Direct, Direct Line) but I’ve not seen anything in the FTTP and ISP market that qualifies as an innovative or disruptive model that will support enduring low prices. Other than differences of scale, the costs of backhaul, connectivity, traffic, installation, fixed assets, interest, customer service are all much of a muchness, and since nobody in the market is making excessive profits, then pricing low is simply throwing money away to gain market share, hoping that something will turn up in future to recoup those losses. Seems most of the altnets are the same, and are backed by Micawber Capital, whose motto remains “something will turn up!”. Curiously enough, they’d be wise to heed some of Wilkins other quotes about balancing your books.
Enjoy the low prices whilst they last, that could be for a few years yet.
I’m moving to them next month.
Haven’t seen a town complete yet?
They came into barrow did a few streets and haven’t been seen in months.
Same in Weston-super-Mare. Maybe they found working round CityFibre and VM ducts is too difficult.
Shame they don’t help the folk in Cumbria stuck on dial up speeds instead on giving others multiple choices
They’re building to make money not help people. Private business not public service.
@Reality Bites, I think you and I are broadly on the same page on many altnet issues, but I can’t help wondering if in the longer term there’s a more viable business building higher cost per property networks in rural or low density areas where there’s no prospect of over-build, compared to the current gold rush of urban over-build, where lower cost per property is going to be offset by lower takeup, higher churn, and prices being set by large supplier’s acquisition offers? Obviously that needs to be considered in the context of BDUK’s slow, chaotic and piecemeal approach to the provision of gigabit broadband, the availability of subsidies, but we know how this pans out.
Competition in railways has essentially ground to a halt with most operators under effective state control if not actual state ownership, competition in energy supply has been a catastrophically expensive disaster, I think we can predict that competition in physical telecoms infrastructure is heading the same way.
Competition to railway already exists. It is called the car
Problem is that, due to an anti prosperity ideology, the govt heavily subsidizes railways and punishes car users with increased taxes on fuel and parking. In london the sad excuse of a mayor even wants a flat car tax.
If all these get lifted then railway becomes somewhere between an unattractive option to complete obsoletion depending on the location A and location B. Vacationing to Italy and Spain is a lot cheaper than to Scotland and starts with rail
The solution to making transportation cheaper is to remove punishment, not to build more rail. Remove the taxation and you can go around the UK for much cheaper
Telecoms on the other hand, why do you care about investors wasting money on overbuild? Overbuild actually has a business case and helps bring down prices. Hyperoptic is a prime example, their basic packages were 30 quid and asymmetrical, now that around 30% of their build has also Community Fibre, they have been forced to bring down the price. If the taxpayer is footing the bill for overbuild then you have an argument and I will agree that the taxpayer should not fund overbuilds, but otherwise you are making the argument that no 2 restaurants should open on the same street
Sam: “Telecoms on the other hand, why do you care about investors wasting money on overbuild?”
I wouldn’t if it was as simple as there being no opportunity cost to overbuild, if investors actually would take the losses, and there were no other consequences.
In reality, the opportunity cost of overbuild is that it reduces utilisation of and returns to existing investments; we spend more money than is required whilst still not getting the 99% coverage that could be delivered quicker for the same or less money; the cost of OR FTTP is bid up significantly by the raised demand for FTTP skills; and when the altnet crash happens, it’ll be taxpayers or bill payers who end up bailing out the banks and investors. Does anyone believe for a nanosecond that this of all governments will let their mates in the City, or foreign donors suffer the results of their own miscalculations? Even if they did, the example of energy is that huge costs get imposed on bill payers. And finally, when business go bust, it doesn’t just affect the investors, it affects employees who don’t have jobs, and suppliers who don’t get paid, it affects economic confidence, government tax revenues. And it will leave many areas with part-complete works that’ll never be finished, as well as in many cases meaning customers lose the only FTTP option they had.
Again you’re just making the argument that if I open a restaurant next to yours, it diminishes the return on your investment. People benefit from lower prices and better quality food. Also the government gets more tax money and people get more jobs. Welcome to competition. Monopolies are horrible except for the one holding the monopoly
Private companies should not be bailed out arbitrarily, this extends to banks, however the transition to communism seems hellbent on bailing out the failed banks like SVB and Credit Suisse
So go somewhere that’s already highly competitive or go somewhere with no competition and clean up??? Makes no sense to me how some of these places are chosen
If it were that simple don’t you think everyone would be doing it? Contrary to apparently popular belief at least some altnets have some clue what they are doing.
The folk stuck on dialup speeds are presumably so expensive to reach they’ll need government subsidy as even Openreach can’t make a business case.
Every altnet has to assume that Openreach will overbuild them. With that in mind they won’t be cleaning up they’ll have just spent a ton of money encouraging Openreach to compete with them.
Openreach can dilute the high cost of an area with loads of cheaper urban areas, altnets can’t.
Some altnets are targeting rural, unserved areas but are doing it very carefully. If you’re on ‘dialup’ speeds at the moment meaning you are so expensive to reach even FTTC hasn’t, you’ll have to wait on government funding.
It will be interesting how Grain Connect will compete with HyperOptic as their packages are very competitive.
Mostly they won’t. Hyperoptic deal almost exclusively in apartments and new builds.
Grain will be doing the more expensive work serving brownfield single dwelling units with apartments opportunistically built to.
Grain didn’t waste any time in Brighton – they’re digging up the road in Brighton (BN1 7HB) today (1 week after the article was published), and already offering packages in their availability checker for addresses in that road.