Yeah it's difficult to find users of particular small providers on these forums.
Think Broadband is not really an official forum for ISPs. The user base on this forum are divided into many different ISPs.

For example Hyperoptic has over 15 thousand reviews on Trustpilot but only a few customers share their experiences here on these forums. Even the subforum here has only 153 threads and 1307 posts in 10 years!

The same with Community Fibre over 18K reviews and 96% positive reviews. But very few people are found on these forums to use their service. I'm waiting for them to arrive in my building soon, support says within a month. It might take longer as I've been waiting 14 months.

Let's see how quickly Grain install for your property!

Usually when there are positive experiences people naturally don't write positive reviews or share them on forums. It's human nature that only negative experiences are shared or written as part of reviews.

VM might offer you a competitive deal. I've read reviews on Youtube for people who had Community Fibre and Hyperoptic where after they haggled with VM then VM tried to persuade them to stick and even tried discouraging them to switch to the new Altnet providers saying they didn't sign up to Ofcom code of practice and speeds will drop, etc. But the reviewers said this was all nonsense and their experiences were very much positive. Most likely they'll try to manipulate you if you speak to them on the phone.

I’m in a similar predicament to OP. I received a Grain flyer in the post to say they would be laying fibre in my area in Birmingham come Q3. My Virgin contract discount drops off around the same time and their service has been abysmal since January having been with them ever since the Blueyonder days. CS treat you with contempt, to the point I have to hang up mid call as they’ll randomly put you on mute for extended periods for no obvious reason.

Openreach have a dislike for inner city Birmingham and where I live I can only get FTTC up to 40 down/20 up or VM. I work <mile from the city centre and my employer is served by the Victoria exchange and the address is still only capable of ADSL 2+ 9 down/1up 😂. We were able to get Virgin to lay cable and connect us up (god what a difference it made)

I’ve pre registered with Grain and from the handful of reviews I’ve read, their routers are pretty locked down to the point you can’t even configure it yourself and the other huge caveat is your router will be double NATted behind CG-NAT and a shared IP between their other customers. I’ve opted for a fixed IP which I was told is an extra £5 per month and the router isn’t much of a problem as they’ve told me they can put it in bridge mode provided I give them the MAC address of my pfSense routers WAN port.

I don’t really see any downsides as I’ll probably be on a less contented and hopefully a less congested service with Grain on 900 up/down fibre as opposed to 200/20 docsis 3.0. It’ll be a shame to see the back of Virgin after being with them for so long. It’s a travesty that they still outsource scripted ‘tech support’ and if they fail to keep up with all these companies now offering FTTP with on shore support, they’ll be losing customers left right and centre

In reply to a post by ian72:

They seem very small and their website doesn't say where they cover. They are on the ThinkBroadband maps as an option but I can't see where they have coverage because you would have to be zoomed in before the dots appears and no idea what areas to zoom in on.

David v Goliath would pretty much sum up this pairing. Apparently Grain have announced their intent to cover some 43 towns and cities in the first phase of their build covering some 400,000 premises according to ISPreview articles linked. Note there’s some duplication in the places announced below.

According to these various ISPR articles the original locations that Grain was aiming for deployment was in the following:
Hull
Leicester
Liverpool
Accrington
Grimsby
Cleethorpes
Scarborough
Carlisle
Barrow-in-Furness
Hartlepool
Newport
Sunderland
Blackburn

A second tranche was announced December 2021:
Birmingham
Bolton
Bradford
Burnley
Manchester
Middlesbrough
Newcastle
North Shields
Oldham
Plymouth
Swindon

A third tranche was announced in January:
Birmingham – Birchfield
Gateshead
Lincoln
Preston
Plymouth – Keyham
St Helens
Wigan
Wolverhampton

A fourth tranche recently announced in May:
Birmingham –Sparkbrook
Birmingham –Bearwood
Burnley
Leicester –Newfoundpool
Liverpool –Anfield
Luton
Manchester – Abbey Hey
Newcastle – Benwell
Seaham

They are one of the few AltNets that use a point-to-point FTTP architecture rather than a shared PON style architecture.

They apparently have a £75m equity injection from Equitix and £10m from Albion Capital. If they do truly intend to pass 400,000 premises then it’s likely that they will need additional funding and there’s been several mentions of a debt financing package of £100m being mooted…

There is a news article on the main site pages now about Grain connect that may be of some interest.

Ive just done the same but cancelled by Virgin 500mb and just gone to Nowtv broadband on a rolling contract. Virgin in my location was very good however I didnt need the tv services anymore as I switched to Sky.

900mb up and down for £29.99 seems good but I will probably also pay for the static IP address depending if CGNAT causes issues.

I will happily report back here with my experiences for Grain Connect onces its activated which is a date of October at the latest....

In reply to a post by Icemen:

Hello peeps
New to this forum so hello to everyone
I had search but can't find many posts on Grain Connect who are a new fibre supplier in my area.
Ive been with virgin broadband for a very long time. I was paying £31 for M350 up until this month when my discounts fell off. Now £60.They have offered my M500 for £38. I not going accept as there is new provider in our area with their own fibre lines, Grain Connect. Anyone with them or heard of them. They should be live by next month. The deals they got on are unbelievable, £30 for 1gb broadband. Uploads and downloads unlimited. I am going wait until they are live then cancel virgin. Test Grain for a month and see if virgin offer anything good or if Grain are good I'll stick with them. Very good reviews on trust pilot. I haven't found anyone who has compared the two yet. Virgin have become so poor nowadays. Lucky if you get through to person holding on the line 60 min minimum any day of the week. In the evening maybe a bit quicker but call will go to india. Loyality doesn't mean a thing to these companies any more.

My advice would be to change, FTTP will be a lot more liekly to have less issues, while yes ther could be a fault, I have been with Virgin Media since 2018 and can tell you cable networks are a deamon.
I would list the faults but you would need a 20 page document, if you think I'm kidding I did a GDPR data request with virgin last year to use it as evidence against them through CIAS and they sent me a copy of all the work orders, it was a 40 page document.

I am with virgin at £29 a month for M500 only as they messed up the contract so gave me a discount from £31 a month. If I had an option for FTTP right now I would have taken it, even if it was an increase. That is even if I don't know the FTTP provider, as chances are if the service is bad, its more liekly to be bad from customer services not the service itself.

If you do go for Grain connect, I would go for a dynamic or static IP as CGNAT can cause issues at times, I know I couldn't cope with CGNAT but obviously thats your call.

Even if grain connect doesn't do exactly 940 up and down even if it does over 500+ constatantly its still a good improvement over Virgin, for me It's worth it at that price, especially when comparing prices at the min.

Im like you mate. Been with them since they was telewest. Their internet is good but now becoming too expensive and their customer service is non existence. Well when i say good i should explain their router and wifi coverage is cack. I tried their boosters and everything nothing works. Only a couple of years ago i discovered access points and never looked back. I wired up two APs in my house, downstairs and upstairs hallway to my router ubiquiti. Then turned the wireless off on the router. Now i get max speeds all the time even with 20 devices connected all over my hse.
Grain said i could connect my AP to their router also they use a Icotera i6855. These any good? But i dont understand when you guys say they use FTTP etc or that might need to buy static IP address. Can you turnoff wireless on Grain routers?

https://www.cooolbox.bg/images/cb/help/Icotera-i6850...

Can someone explain this to me pls?
What is CGNAT? And do virgin use? I've not had to request dynamic or static Ip address with them?

If you do go for Grain connect, I would go for a dynamic or static IP as CGNAT can cause issues at times, I know I couldn't cope with CGNAT but obviously thats your call.

Usually a provider gives you a single WAN IP address.
It is either dynamic (it changes occasionally, anything from once a week to once a year, depending on the provider) or static (it never changes).
Your router then performs NAT to direct that single IP to the devices in your home.
That WAN IP address is globally routable, meaning it can be directly connected to from anywhere in the world provided your firewall allows it.

With CGNAT the provider usually doesn't have enough WAN IP's to give everyone 1 each, so they share a single WAN IP between a lot of users. The provider then uses CGNAT (Carrier Grade NAT) to direct the right traffic to the right household.

The downsides of CGNAT depends on your usage, but they include things like...
You share an IP with many users so any ban on them will affect everyone on that IP.
Port forwarding doesn't work.
You can't host things from home line you can with dynamic/static IP.
It can even prevent you from viewing certain home camera systems.

IPV6 can get round some of these issues but not all providers support IPV6. Not all devices and services do either.

Virgin give you a dynamic IP, but in my 18 months with Virgin it never changed once.

Many new upcoming providers have to use CGNAT because the world is all out of IPV4 addresses. They need to buy IPV4 addresses from other people and this can be expensive. That's why they use CGNAT and charge the customer for a static IP address.