Construction Archives – Briant Communications

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

09/11/2022 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

12/10/2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Construction • Energy Saving • General Information • Renovation copper replacement • energy efficiency • full fibre 0 Comments

Switching to Full Fibre Doesn’t Just Give You Faster Broadband

There are many benefits to switching to Full Fibre broadband, something the UK is in line to achieve before 2025. These don’t only include faster download and upload speeds, but there are many other benefits too.

One of the drawbacks of copper cable is that it is heavy, another is that it is fragile. It weighs about 10g per foot, and there were 57,000,000 miles of copper cable buried under the ground and hanging from telegraph poles, (I’ve done the numbers, that’s 3,960,000 tonnes) and it’s easy for it to get damaged by high winds, damage poles, roadworks digging in the wrong place and many other causes.

Copper Is Costly

Copper is also valuable. At the time of writing the value of refined copper is $7,450 per tonne. With almost four million tonnes of copper lying around, that’s a huge resource, and a huge temptation. Throughout the UK and elsewhere there have been several incidents where there have been phone and internet outages due to people stealing data cable. (With the very low amperages used in telephony and data, it’s clearly a much safer bet than stealing electrical cable!) Fibre on the other hand is virtually valueless to anyone who isn’t a fibre installer.

So fibre’s more likely to be left in the ground, and while it’s there it’s a lot less likely to require maintenance too. Verizon, the US phone and data provider report that in New York, after installing fibre there has been a 60% reduction in truck deployments to maintenance issues, and a 40-60% reduction in associated costs. Read more

05/10/2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Construction • General Information • Home Entertainment copper • fibre • spectrum 0 Comments

How Does Fibre Broadband Work So Fast?

If you remember your physics from school you’ll know that electricity travels at the speed of light, and that the speed of light is a constant (provided it’s travelling through a medium which isn’t incredibly dense, or incredibly cold, or a black hole… OK in NORMAL circumstances light speed is a constant!), so if electricity can travel down a wire that fast, how does fibre, which uses light instead of electricity, transmit so much more data?

It’s not as if Full Fibre is a little bit faster than copper wire either. Depending on how far you are from the internet exchange you’re using you could get speeds of up to 80 Mbps on copper cable. If you happened to live 100 metres or less from the servers. Go to 200 metres and your speed could drop to 65 Mbps, and it would get slower and slower the further you kept going without the introduction of repeaters, boosters and other devices that keep the signal strong and fast. Read more

28/09/2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Construction • General Information • WiFi cityfibre • full fibre 0 Comments

Briant Broadband And CityFibre Bring Full Fibre To Worthing

By 2025 the UK should be well into the process of withdrawing copper cables for broadband and phone lines, having replaced a projected minimum 85% with fibre optic cable instead.

The plan is to swap from outdated copper phone lines to gigabit fibre technology with the least interruption possible, so if your current cable comes under the ground that’s where the new line will go. Similarly, if your phone or broadband cable comes via a telegraph pole, that’s how your new fibre connection will be made.

Many homes are already connected to Full Fibre technology. Many others are connected to Fibre to the Cabinet, a broadband system which takes advantage of both copper and fibre to quickly and cheaply give better (but not gigabit broadband) internet to homes and business.

Briant Broadband are working closely with CityFibre to make Full Fibre available to as many people in Adur and Worthing as possible. CityFibre are one of the national infrastructure providers who’ve been retained to make the 2025 broadband rollout a reality. Among others, they are responsible for installing millions of kilometres of fibre optic cable from data centres through exchanges to streets throughout the country. Once it’s in place it’s up to companies such as broadband ISPs like Briant Broadband to connect the end of the fibre filament to a router in your home so you can enjoy up to 900 Mbps with complete reliability. Read more

08/06/2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Construction • General Information full fibre • infrastructure • installation 0 Comments

Why are some Full Fibre completions slower than others?

All over the country broadband infrastructure companies such as CityFibre are working to get full fibre broadband installed. There is a target to get up to 75% of all homes and businesses connected by 2026 and more than 99% connected by 2030. While some broadband ISPs are connecting almost as soon as the fibre is in the ground, some are taking considerably longer. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why.

People throughout the UK are starting to realise that simply because the infrastructure in in situ, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to be connected immediately. In fact they put up with the disruption of having their street dug up, but they still don’t know when they’re going to be finally connected to Fibre Fast broadband.

Disillusionment follows. You see the ads for Superfast and Ultrafast broadband on the TV and on social media, you know that the fibre optic line is right there, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone willing to connect those last few metres of cable to your router. Read more

17/03/2022 By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Construction • General Information cityfibre • FTTP • full fibre • installation 0 Comments

Is Your Home Connected To Full Fibre Yet?

Anyone living in Worthing will have noticed the engineers from Cityfibre putting purple wires into the ground, they’re probably on your street right now!

In fact those aren’t ordinary wires, those are fibre optic cables, and your home or business is currently being connected to Full Fibre, a nationwide programme of connecting people to superfast and ultrafast broadband internet, and foregoing old, slow copper phone lines.

Briant Broadband is a business partner of Cityfibre, making us your only genuinely Worthing based local internet service provider.

What does Full Fibre to the Property mean?

Cityfibre and several other infrastructure installers are part of a national programme to get as many people as possible onto superfast and ultrafast Full Fibre broadband by replacing old copper telephone wires with fibre optic cable which is able to deliver vast quantities of data in a flash. Full Fibre to the Property (or FTTP) means that you get fibre fast broadband right into your router direct from the local exchange. Because Full Fibre broadband eliminates old copper telephone wires altogether we’re now able to reliably bring you broadband speeds of 900 Mbps. Read more

15/10/2021 By Dan Cash CCTV • Construction • Do It Yourself • General Information • Tips and Tricks fine • neighbour • smart doorbell 0 Comments

Smart Doorbell Owner Receives Fine For Neglecting GDPR

Most of us either get on with, or are completely oblivious to our neighbours. When we get home after a hard day’s work we’re not really interested in hearing from the people next-door’s kids or from the student flat across the street at half past two on a Sunday morning.

Most of us like a quiet life where we live in mutual, amicable ignorance of our neighbours. We say ‘hi!’ or nod in recognition and go on about our day. So keen on avoiding any kind of friction are we that we make accommodations for our neighbours, because letting things slide is SO much easier than the awkwardness and potential for embarrassment that confronting them over their inconsiderate behaviour presents.

However, this week a county court had to decide in the case of a neighbour who’s Smart doorbells overlooked a neighbour’s property. And because he wasn’t neighbourly, he now faces a maximum fine of up to £100,000.

He probably won’t have to pay that much, but there are other things he should have done before it ever got to the county court. (The fact that it was a county court means that no legal precedent has been set, so if you own a Smart doorbell you won’t need to be hiring a solicitor just yet!)

The case revolved around an audio-visual technician in Oxfordshire who installed Smart doorbells and some dummies as he wanted to deter thieves from returning to his property after it was broken into. He set one to watch from the front door, covering the street and the approach to his house. Others were pointed at a shared parking space, the drive leading to that car park and a portion of his neighbour’s property, including a window. The neighbour who brought the case brought it on the grounds of harassment, nuisance and breeching data protection legislation. And it was mostly on not fulfilling his obligations as the data controller that the defendant lost his case. Read more

05/07/2021 By Dan Cash Construction • Design • Do It Yourself • Home Cinema • Home Entertainment • Tips and Tricks home cinema • home theatre • outdoor • projector 0 Comments

Create Your Own Temporary Outdoor Home Cinema

Drive-In in the Back Yard, Your Next DIY Project

Summer’s here, but the time isn’t yet right for dancing in the street. Instead, while lockdowns are being eased, it’s still not wise to gather in large groups with strangers. Nevertheless, the nice weather means that it’s nice to relax and enjoy the garden. So why not set up a temporary home cinema in the garden and enjoy the big screen experience without the hassle of having to leave the house? The first thing you’re going to need will be something to watch the movie on. You could haul a TV into the garden, but if that kind of hassle isn’t for you, then a projector is going to be the answer. Depending on the size of your garden, and where you’re going to sit will affect the kind of projector you want.

Projectors today are quite different from anything you might remember if you’ve only been keeping an eye on televisions. Today they are small, adaptable, and so bright you can watch them in daylight while ‘short throw’ projectors can sit a few inches away from the screen and still provide a huge, high definition picture. If you need to hang the projector above head height you can invert the image, or reverse it if you want to project the picture from the back of the screen.

Getting your movies from your computer to your projector and speakers is a synch. A Chromecast or Fire TV Stick can be plugged direct into the HDMI port, making it simple and trip hazard free (the projector does need to have a powered USB port though, as casting devices don’t have batteries). Read more

09/04/2021 By Dan Cash Construction • Do It Yourself • Renovation • Tips and Tricks aerials • gardens • maintenance • roofs • spring cleaning 0 Comments

The Household Spring Cleaning & Maintenance You Should Do Today

house, home, home maintenance, spring clean, repairs

Now the clocks have gone forward it must be spring! And there’s something primal about the urge to spring clean and carry out home maintenance. You’ve had all winter to think about those jobs you want to do, but you know you need a few days of good weather to really get to grips with them. You might be itching to throw open the windows and get right into giving the carpet a good shampoo, or you might have been obsessing over the state of the paint around your windows, and you’re dreaming of the day you can peel it back, repair the putty, fill any holes and give it a thorough lick of weatherproof paint. (Hands up, I’m guilty of both of those! But a damp carpet AND paint fumes at the same time? I think I’ll be spreading those jobs out…)

This year spring cleaning, probably more than any in living memory for most of us, will be an almost visceral event. After a year of being mostly stuck indoors and worrying we’ll finally be able to get fresh air into the house, scrub the woodwork, dust all the nooks and crannies and clear our heads too. We call it ‘Spring Cleaning’ but there’s a lot of DIY maintenance and household DIY which you’ll want to get up to your elbows in as well. Read more

Category: Construction

Talk To Your Broadband Provider As Early As Possible

Copper Is Costly

What does Full Fibre to the Property mean?

Drive-In in the Back Yard, Your Next DIY Project