Broadband ISP Grain has just added the North East Lincolnshire (England) seaside town of Cleethorpes to their rollout plan for a new 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which looks set to form part of their wider goal of covering 300,000 UK premises by the end of 2026.
At present Grain, which was recently boosted by a £75 million equity investment from Equitix (here), has already revealed network expansion plans for parts of Leicester, Liverpool, Accrington, Grimsby, Scarborough, Carlisle, Barrow-in-Furness, Hartlepool, Newport, Sunderland and Blackburn, among others.
The latest town to be added today is Cleethorpes, which is no surprise given their existing plan for neighbouring Grimsby. Some of the first streets due to be connected in Phase One will include those around Lovett Street and Tiverton Street, and will add Park View, Grimsby Road and Lestrange Street, with plans to expand to “thousands more homes in the coming months“. Sadly, they don’t provide a clear timescale for this rollout or indicate exactly how many premises will be passed.
New customers can expect to pay from just £25 per month for a symmetric speed 50Mbps package, which goes up to £55 for their top 900Mbps plan. All of these packages come with an 18-month minimum contract term, unlimited usage, free installation and a router. The provider also pledges “no in-contract price rises.”
However, it’s perhaps fair to say that some of Grain’s recent rollout announcements have been in towns that looked set to be aggressively competitive due to the presence of several rivals, although Cleethorpes appears to be a much more viable location.
Despite KCOM and InternetTY having their own FTTP builds in the county, neither has yet named Cleethorpes for their respective deployment plans and Openreach also appears to have shunned the area (i.e. it doesn’t appear on their rollout plan yet, but they do have a few small pockets of FTTP nearby and have named Grimsby). As such, Grain’s only major gigabit-capable competitor will be Virgin Media and the area looks as if it could support two such players.
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