Grain Connect FTTP Discussion

[Sparx]

Hi guys, so I noticed today on roadworks map (www.one.network) that Grain are starting to build in my town it seems. I've never heard of them until today, I did always wonder if any independent fibre co would come to our area. As I always see marketing for B4RN, YouFibre, Hyperoptic, City Fibre etc...

There's about a dozen roadworks notices from them near the town centre it seems. I've sent them a message asking if they're planning on doing the majority of our town or select areas, as I'm nearer the outskirts and would love 1Gb symmetrical for £55pm

I mean tbf we only moved house earlier this year and we have VM available, currently on 600Mb and upgrading to Gig1 shortly. But that upload is tasty and the pricing!

Curious if anyone has heard of or used them? https://www.grainconnect.com/for-your-home/our-packages/

 

[Ayahuasca]

Bumping as I've just noticed the same thing in our town. They haven't started with our street but I asked an engineer this morning when out walking the dog and they plan to cover pretty much the whole town.

Maybe I can finally bin off Virgin with their ridiculous pricing and jitterfest connection.

 

[craigy2302]

Grain installed their network down my old street in Scarborough.

I did some investigating around the time, and after a few calls decided it wasn't for me and stuck with my AAISP FTTC. Their home plans are CG-NAT based, so no port forwarding and they don't currently support IPv6. If you want to be able to forward ports without setting up a VPN or something, you'll need to pay for their Business Plan (which doesn't have symmetrical upload).

 

[Ayahuasca]

Yeah, looking into them more, I doubt I'll go for them. I have no idea why they're so restrictive on certain things; it's going to put a lot of people off who bother to read the smallprint.

 

[Caged]

I can sort of sympathise because altnets have no way of getting the quantity of IPv4 addresses that they need, but the answer to that is to build your network around IPv6 and consider IPv4 as a second-class citizen. CGNAT with no IPv6 support is going to provide an awful experience for anything that isn't basically web browsing, downloading and streaming, at which point the 30Mbps FTTC that someone might already have is likely sufficient.

I'm not sure if it's within the remit of what Ofcom can touch as they seem more concerned with ensuring that hundreds of ISPs can resell the same service and compete by pricing their products 50p differently than they do with actually encouraging network growth, but CGNAT and no IPv6 shouldn't be allowed to be sold unless it's specifically called out in advertising as being a "no online gaming, you'll have to complete CAPTCHA forms on websites all the time" tier of service.

 

[xb8browney]

Anyone else joined them?

I've been with virgin for 5 years but grain is digging up our street in December, it's a terrace street and city fibre is digging up the road/path too but is going to be rear access which I don't want.

900 up and down £35 pm

 

[Amraam]

Thinking about joining Grain too myself. 900 up/down for £14.99 for 6 months, then £29.99 for the remaining 12 months.

 

[xb8browney]

Thinking about joining Grain too myself. 900 up/down for £14.99 for 6 months, then £29.99 for the remaining 12 months.

I joined them in April and it's unlikely I'll renew my contract.

Poor support

Congestion (now resolved)

Took me over 2 month to get a static IP and when I did it's geolocation was Germany.

Plus is the price and no contract price increase.

 

[Vanquish-Storm]

What router did you end up with Grain?

 

[xb8browney]

What router did you end up with Grain?

Icotera i6850

 

[Con D Oriano]

I joined them in April and it's unlikely I'll renew my contract.

Poor support

Congestion (now resolved)

Took me over 2 month to get a static IP and when I did it's geolocation was Germany.

Plus is the price and no contract price increase.

Came across this post as I was doing some digging as I was considering joining Grain.

I'm not tech savvy but still kind of put off now. I mainly game (PS5), stream sports and work from home.
Would you recommend grain if this is all someone is using their broadband for?


Out of curiosity and as April is round the corner, which provider are you planning to join if you don't stay with Grain?

 

[xb8browney]

I don't game anymore so I can't comment on gaming performance.

I do have a friend that was getting issues before with pc gaming with COD but I'm not sure if it's still happening.

There was also a county outage 2am to 10am last week which was fun.

I'd probably go with Vodafone, I did want to try yayzi but they also seem to have more problems than most when looking at Reddit.

 

[Avalon]

I'd probably go with Vodafone, I did want to try yayzi but they also seem to have more problems than most when looking at Reddit.

When looking at CF issues, almost anything install related isn’t anything to do with the ISP, whoever that is. Yayzi aren’t perfect by any stretch, last weeks incident with NTT sucked and about 40% of the user base spent most of a day without service, but it’s about the only major downtime they have had nationally (that wasn’t Telehouse loosing power), and the reason they tend to get mentioned on Reddit is unlike most other ISP’s, they’re actively officially represented which hardly anyone does. New transit provider seems to have improved routing and peering significantly for those down south, single digit pings to the usual suspects, but it’s still a work in progress and once the Manchester site goes active ping shud be better for those of us up North. Yet to raise a routing issue, I figured I would let things settle down and Liam catch up on his sleep first.