2022 – Briant Communications

How to get Full Fibre Broadband For Your Home

Full Fibre Broadband is being rolled out throughout the country, and upwards of 85% of homes and businesses should be able to get Full Fibre by 2025. In the meantime more and more homes are being connected, but how do you make sure you’re getting the fastest broadband internet?

First Of All, What Is Full Fibre?

Full Fibre is also called FTTP or FTTH which stands for Fibre To The Property/Premises of Fibre To The Home. What it means is that there is an uninterrupted fibre optic connection from your router to the datacentres which sit at the heart of the World Wide Web. Because copper phone lines are limited to the amount of data they are able to relay any stage of the journey from or to the servers from your router which is over copper phone lines is going to be slower, slowing the entire process. Full Fibre means that your broadband internet service provider is able to give you speeds up to 900 Mbps because there is never a stage at which the signal is slowed down. Read more

9th December 2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Construction • General Information • Home Entertainment • Tips and Tricks change provider • moving home • new home 0 Comments

Moving Home? Move To Better Broadband Too!

Moving home is always stressful, but it’s something most of us have in the back of our minds most of the time. A new house with all the mod cons, and better storage would be a delight for most of us. It’s just finding the money, time and the right house that slows most of us down!

When you do move it’s neve just a clean hop from one house to the next either. What with chains, bills and estate agents and solicitors to deal with finding your dream home can quickly become a nightmare!

Speaking of bills, most of them can be dealt with quite easily. You just have to tell your utility provider the date you moved and a meter reading and that’s usually about it. Unfortunately your broadband and TV bills probably won’t be that easy, especially if you’re not out of your minimum contract period. If you’re going somewhere where your current provider can continue to offer the same package you’re already on you should, ideally, be able to just change the address the bills go to. If not you may have to pay a penalty fee for breaking your contract early.

Talk To Your Broadband Provider As Early As Possible

You should aim to get your new service arranged a month or so before your moving date to ensure that you’re connected as soon as you arrive. If you’re moving to an address your current provider serves it should be as simple as letting them know your new address. However, they may not offer the best service if you’re moving somewhere out of the way, but it may be worth sticking with them until you find a better service provider to that area. Read more

2nd December 2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • Home Entertainment • Tips and Tricks broadband • contract • ISP • shopping • top tips 0 Comments

Choosing Your Next Broadband Provider: Top Tips

Finding the best broadband deal that suits both your demand for high speed internet and your budget can be quite the juggling act. First you have to find a provider who serves your area, then you have to navigate all the different packages they offer, comparing this price with that, the speed, the duration of the contract, and then there’s the additional extras they don’t tell you about until you put your order in. Line rental? That’s another £25 or more per month. Installation? £40 to £50 should cover it.

And it’s vital that you choose the right deal, and pick carefully since you could be in that contract for between 12 to 24 months. Choose badly and you could be paying through the nose for your data, or paying a lower price for really poor speeds, which amounts to the same thing. You can’t get out of the contract without paying penalties, or if your provider does do a package which is better for you, you may be due admin fees if you decide you need to change.

And your needs can change at any time. Get a Smart HDTV and suddenly your need for fast internet spikes. Your college age kids move out to go to university and suddenly you only need a fraction of the bandwidth you had before. So do you stick with a plan which no longer suits you, or do you pay the admin fees to get a better product? Read more

25th November 2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • Home Entertainment • Tips and Tricks • WiFi broadband • full fibre • Video Games and Gaming 0 Comments

Full Fibre Makes You A Winner When It Comes To Gaming

Any online gaming fan knows the horror of an unexpected interruption to Wi-Fi reception or a slow connection causing freezing and buffering just when you didn’t need it. You’ve got the enemy in your sights, you pull the trigger and nothing but a spinning wheel of death. By the time you’re back up you’ve already respawned and been killed three times and you’re on your way out again.

If you’re the bill payer and chief game player, or your kids hassle you constantly to get better broadband because they’re too embarrassed to go online to play since they can never keep up with the action you might be interested in taking up Full Fibre when CityFibre install it in your area

Full Fibre delivers the kind of internet connection which mean that everyone in the house can be playing in an international tournament, streaming a movie and checking Facebook all at the same time and not see any slowing in their data speed. Read more

18th November 2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • WiFi apps • cyber spring clean 0 Comments

How About A Cyber Spring Clean To Make Room For New Tech?

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas all starting to appear on the horizon it’s time to take care of a belated ‘Cyber Spring Clean’ to ensure that your digital network is spruced up, cleared out and ready for any new devices and apps which you’ll need as we head out of 2022.

If you’re anything like me you’ll have apps and interfaces for services and devices you barely use any more. Either you’ve stopped using them, you only use them rarely, or you don’t bother with the app because you’ve ended up using another method to make the thing work for you.

While apps which aren’t running won’t slow your phone or laptop down, they do take up space, meaning clutter and confusion. And if you’re paying a subscription for additional services and you’re not using the app or device any longer then that’s pure waste.

So how do you go about taking care of a Cyber Spring Clean?

Start From The Top

Cleaning out your Wi-Fi network is a good place to start. Go into your router settings and you can see all the connected devices. If there are any you don’t recognise you can kick them off, and if something you rely on suddenly stops working you can just reconnect it. On the other hand you might have just kicked off a neighbour who was piggybacking off your data. Not really a big deal in these days of unlimited data and ultrafast connections, but a user you don’t know about is going to eat up your bandwidth, meaning slower overall speeds, particularly if you use a slower broadband package. And they’re a security threat too, as being on your network means they could conceivably get access to Smart devices such as cameras, devices with microphones, and access controls. Read more

14th November 2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Do It Yourself • Home Cinema • Home Entertainment • Tips and Tricks • WiFi 0 Comments

Getting A Smart TV On Black Friday? Can Your Broadband Cope?

If you’re starting to think about what you’re going to put on your Black Friday or Cyber Monday (November 25th this year) shopping list you might be thinking about a Smart TV. Maybe it’s just for the lounge, or maybe you’re thinking about creating a home cinema experience for yourself and your family where you can enjoy movies, play online games, and enjoy the benefits of having a media centre at home.

But here’s a thing to consider if you’re going to connect your TV to a broadband connection rather than an aerial or satellite receiver: do you have enough data?

While it’s not an issue with smaller screen TVs, every inch of a large screen HD TV screen needs broadband to make it work. Slow internet access will mean that picture quality will slump, freezing, glitching and ‘The Spinning Wheel of Death’ will cause constant interruptions, and overall your enjoyment of something which is supposed to be one of life’s little treats will be a frustrating pain in the neck. Read more

9th November 2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Construction • Renovation cable laying • digging • full fibre • telegraph pole 0 Comments

Full Fibre Broadband Without The Need For Digging Disruption

Getting Ultrafast Full Fibre to your home is intended to make access to the World Wide Web as quick and convenient as possible. In order to achieve that, a little inconvenience will be involved now.

Briant Broadband’s business partners CityFIbre are undertaking the work of installing fibre optic cables throughout the region, and naturally installing infrastructure hardware means digging. But in some places that’s not possible. In those cases your cable will be delivered via a good old fashioned telegraph pole.

Telegraph poles have been a feature of the urban and rural village landscape for many years and have benefits quite separate from those that digging involves. Digging a trench in which to lay a cable is labour intensive, expensive, time consuming and creates a great deal of disruption. The advantage is that once the fibre is in place it’s so well protected that it will never need maintenance or repairs except in the very unlikely event that another utility provider digs down deep enough in the wrong place to damage it.

On the other hand fibre which hangs from a telegraph pole is vulnerable to debris blown about by high winds, overheight loads on vehicles, even deliberate vandalism. However, that vulnerability is also its benefit as any damaged section can be quickly and easily replaced without causing any disruption to traffic, parking, or access to the homes of local residents.

What are the other benefits to having a pole instead of digging a trench? Read more

2nd November 2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • CCTV • General Information • Home Entertainment • Home Security • WiFi full fibre • iot • reliable internet • smart home 0 Comments

Why Adopting Full Fibre Is A Smart Decision For IoT

Remember when you were a kid and dreamed of having robots help with your homework, do your chores and even beat up the big kids who hung around the end of your street giving, you a hard time when you wanted to go to the park?

Today that dream is a reality (except for the bully-thrashing droids: ethics and all that). With the Internet of Things making many of our electronic purchases ‘Smart’ we can now talk to the objects which surround us and they will do as we ask.

Whereas once we could only access the internet via a computer, the Internet of Things (IoT) means that all connected devices are able to communicate with one another, sharing information which makes it possible for them all to work in conjunction, and therefore more efficiently. Many of these devices could be considered gimmicky, and only ‘Smart’ for the sake of being smart, and not for any functional necessity. Read more

26th October 2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • Tips and Tricks • WiFi download speed • internet • upload speed 0 Comments

Why Internet Upload Speeds With Full Fibre Make A Difference

When you’re shopping around for different broadband internet deals you might have noticed that most providers show different speeds for downloads and uploads, and sometimes that difference is huge. But what’s the difference, and why does it matter?

For most people going about their usual online business, their biggest concern is going to be download speeds. How fast do pictures on Instagram take to load, how quickly do Reels load, do streaming movies keep needing to buffer (especially during the best bits!), spoiling your viewing experience?

Those concerns are all due to download speeds. If you’ve got fast downloads then you’ve got that covered. So why are upload speeds of any importance? Read more

19th October 2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information 0 Comments

Full Fibre For Your Business

Installing a Full Fibre connection for your business will ensure a number of positive impacts for your team, and your bottom line.

There are few businesses today which don’t rely on broadband internet in some form or another. From simply having an email address where potential customers can reach you, to running an enterprise which depends exclusively on a website geared toward taking customer orders we all need to be able to access the internet at some point every day.

Depending on how your company uses the internet the demands you have from your broadband provider are going to be different, but there are several key issues that any company is going to require from a data provider before signing the dotted line.

Reliable Speeds and Stable Access

Time is money, and you can’t have your workforce sitting around wasting time as they wait for files to load, gazing at spinning wheels instead of accessing the internet, or freezing during videoconferencing with clients or business partners. Rather they need to be able to get instant access to the internet no matter what time of day. Full Fibre delivers a stable, symmetrical service over fibre optic cables. Uploads are as fast as downloads meaning sharing the biggest files can take place while simultaneously Zooming with as many people who need to be in attendance. Read more