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I see this type of background a lot: 
It's usually a light gray with slightly darker gray specks, but this is a pretty dark grey with lighter gray specks. How is this sort of thing done in photoshop?
I've asked around before and was told to try rendering clouds and then applying the mosaic pixelation, but that didn't work out too well. I've tried various things but haven't been able to come up with anything similar.
I´ll tell you what I did (also with add noise) but with some more flexibility afterwards:
Make a new document, 200px/200px (depending on your aim with black or white background, both works) > apply the Add Noise filter on a new layer as smart-object with 10%, check gaussian, and monochromatic > click ok. Now you can define the opacity of the noise in the layer palette. change the opacity to 20% > edit > define as pattern. now also do it with 40%,60%,80% and 100% and always save it as pattern.
After that you go to the layer options of the layer you want to add the effect and then you can customize the opacity directly, see how it looks and play around with the methods.
This effect is built into Photoshop:
Filter>Noise>Add noise
