Grain full-fibre now available in Luton

Luton is the latest Grain Connect urban area to surface on our broadband maps. Specifically the Bury Park of the town, and is in direct competition with the Openreach full-fibre roll-out.

Grain presentation at Connected North 2024, showing key metrics for the alt-net

The picture above was taken at Connected North in Manchester on Tuesday, from a presentation by the Grain CEO. The presentation highlighted the low cost per premises passed that Grain is achieving and without using poles, i.e. a debt of £131 per property passed. In terms of footprint where are 236,000 premises passed, which reduces to 207,000 that are fully ready for service. Also the number of customers signed up has been shared at 28,000 Grain customers.

The addition of the streets we’ve spotted as RFS in Luton brings our footprint on the maps to 186,000 premises, and we will obviously keep looking for new areas. The bulk of what we find each week at present though is expansion of existing areas i.e. as premises passed go to RFS and therefore can go on our maps.

The low cost for premises passed is headline grabbing, and we don’t doubt the maths but a common theme when looking for areas where Grain is available is the property density, and Google Streetview shows this with one of the latest Luton streets. If the roll-out was to cover more of the areas like this road in Luton where its a mixture of semi and detached properties the debt per property would be higher.

The reality that Grain appears to be focussing on high property density streets is in no way meant as a slight on the alt-net, but is purely on observation we’ve seen time after time with their urban roll-out. The picture in the new build areas is different, and a lot of that is if you are rolling out during the construction phase for new build it will often be soft dig or the building is doing a lot of the work as they value being able to market properties as having full-fibre ready to do as soon as you move in.