By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • Home Entertainment • WiFi • • 0 Comments

How Does Broadband Internet Get From Your ISP To Your Computer?

wireless router, wifi router, router, wireless, digital broadband, broadband, digital, wireless, full fibre, fast fibre, superfast fibre, ultrafast fibre, What technology you have connecting your home to the World Wide Web will drastically affect the speed at which you can access broadband internet.

Up until recently almost all internet infrastructure would have been via ADSL, essentially the old phone cable networking which has been with us for generations. While the internet was a luxury that not everybody needed low speeds and a limited network were sufficient, but now that it’s considered a utility, and a part of the basket of goods by which the retail price index is measured.

Today, with the unrelenting demand for faster and faster broadband the old copper cables can’t cope. The technology was originally designed to transmit the human voice to other people (relatively) nearby. The human voice operates at around 50Hz and most phone calls people make were to friends and neighbours who live nearby. However, by introducing the internet to the equation the phone lines now need to deliver data at 2.45GHz all over the world.

To overcome the limitations a number of solutions have been invented. First among these is Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC). FTTC is based on fibre optic technology, taking advantage of the fact that by using light instead of electrical impulses to transmit data it can deliver speeds many times that which cable alone can provide. FTTC is something of a compromise in  terms of data speeds and convenience of installation. Fibre optic lines are installed as far as the kerbside cabinets you find at the end of most streets. From there they use the existing copper wires to connect your home to the web. That copper leg does slow the data down, however, because the rest of the data’s journey is fibre optic, the overall system is much faster than copper cable alone. FTTC involves using existing connections to the home, so there is no digging up pavements or installing new overhead lines to each property. Read more

By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Do It Yourself • General Information • Home Entertainment • Tips and Tricks • WiFi • 0 Comments

The Causes Of A Slow Wi-Fi Router And How To Fix It

router, wireless, digital, broadband, internet,It’s no good having up to 900 Mbps Full Fibre if your Wi-Fi connection to your devices is slow. You could plug an ethernet cable from your computer to the router, but that defeats the point of Wi-Fi, and what about all the devices which can’t be plugged in? There are several reasons for poor Wi-Fi, some of which could need investment in extenders, Point to Point transmitters, and mesh discs, but some of them are simple solutions you can take care of in a few minutes.

Router Placement

Where your router is positioned within the home can have an incredible effect on the speed your internet connected devices work. Placing it near the front door, where the cable comes into your home, seems like an obvious idea, but if most of your internet use takes place at the back of the house, upstairs, or in a home office located in the garden then the distance the signal has to travel, and the obstacles it has to pass through can have a great effect on the amount of bandwidth available to each machine.

To overcome this, simply place your router nearer where the action is. If your family doesn’t all sit in the same room to access the internet (and what family would!?) try to place the router at the centre of the home. This means that each laptop, phone, smart speaker and TV will have an equal opportunity to get signal. And place it somewhere high up. It might be tempting to put it on the floor behind a desk, somewhere out of the way, but putting it on the desk, or better yet on a high shelf. This extends the broadcast range and means less objects the signal has to pass through before reaching your device. Read more

By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • Home Entertainment • WiFi • • • • 0 Comments

Full Fibre, FTTP, FTTH and FTTC. What Is Going On!?

fibre, fibre optic, fibre optic cable, FTTP, FTTH, FTTC, Full Fibre, Fibre Broadband, broadband, fast fibre, If you’re shopping around for a new broadband internet provider because your old one was too expensive or unreliable you’ve probably been introduced to some new terms which we shall attempt to explain.

You’ll no doubt have heard of FTTC, FTTP and FTTH. The good news is that Full Fibre, FTTP and FTTH are exactly the same thing. They stand for ‘Fibre To The Property’ and ‘Fibre To the Home’ so essentially they both mean that the fibre connection goes all the way from your local exchange down your street, across your garden, through the wall and into your router. Once its there it can deliver up to 900 Mbps which can then be distributed via Wi-Fi or an ethernet cable directly to a laptop or desktop machine, Smart devices and TV.

So what is FTTC?

FTTC is ‘Fibre To The Cabinet’. The cabinet in question is the green phone cabinet you probably have at the end of your street. Sometimes you’ll see a phone engineer sitting in front of one deftly knitting among a bird’s nest of cables and you wonder how they can possibly make any sense of the jumble of wires in front of them. So the fibre goes from the exchange, down your street, but instead of going across your garden and into your wall, it stops at this cabinet and gets connected to your copper phone line instead. Because the copper wire is already installed right up the phone socket in your home it’s much cheaper to install and far less disruptive as there is much less digging of residential streets involved. Dynamic Line Management takes care of ensuring that your connection remains, error free, fast and stable automatically. Read more

By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • Home Entertainment 0 Comments

How Much Data Is In Your Broadband Data Plan?

Aerial, satellite dish, installation, home entertainment, TV hanging, TV mounting, TV wall hanging, smart home, smart home automation, smart home security, security, security devices, home security, home security camera, house alarm, business alarm, business security, home automation, environmental control, smart lighting, smart lights, smart home system, cable installation, fibre optic installation, fibre installation, fibre repair, fibre optic repair, fibre data, fibre broadband, wireless data, wireless broadband, internet service provider, isp, wireless internet service provider, wisp, worthing, arundel, angmering, hove, littlehampton, south coast, sussex, UK,Briant Broadband offers Superfast wireless broadband and Full Fibre Superfast and Ultrafast broadband throughout the Worthing and Adur region. We offer

But what is Superfast Wireless, Ultrafast Full Fibre, and what do the speeds mean to you as a consumer? 

Briant Broadband’s Superfast wireless broadband is available to people living in Worthing and beyond who can see the top of the Bayside apartment building from their home. We have a transmitter located on Bayside’s roof which we use to beam broadband data without the need for cables, phone lines or line rental. Because it’s wireless we are limited to the amount of data we can supply, currently that’s 100 Mbps to each customer. However, that ‘limit’ still allows us to deliver data speeds greater than you would have expected to find with a service which depended on copper phone lines. Read more

By Dan Cash Home Cinema • Home Entertainment 0 Comments

What is Dolby, and why is it so important to Home Cinema enthusiasts?

Dolbydolby, tv sound, sound quality first came to prominence as a noise reduction process, invented by Thomas Dolby in the 1960s. Before his noise reduction process was developed static and hiss on magnetic tapes and optical film would spoil the sound of a movie. Various ways were tried to get around it, such as reducing treble but using this method could only go so far before the dialogue began to be distorted or muffled.

As tape was rapidly superseding optical sound reproduction (a process where the sound is recorded as a visible signal on the edge of the film and converted back into sound when the film is run through a projector which is fitted with the right audio capability) the Dolby Noise Reduction (NR) was applied to improving the sound on tape by electronically suppressing the noise which is inherent in magnetic tape recordings. Read more

By Dan Cash CCTV • Energy Saving • Home Entertainment • • 0 Comments

Why Is Turning On Smart Lights So Frustrating?

phone, smart phone, unlock smart phone screenAccessing your Smart Home environmental controls via your phone is handy. It’s the easiest way to control your lighting, heating, air conditioning, even answering the door. So why is it so difficult to take master these controls without having to unlock your phone?

It’s not the worst of all First World Problems, but it does create a frustrating delay when what we all want is immediacy and the instant satisfaction that we get from flipping a switch.

Smart Home integration is supposed to be quick and convenient, but if you have to unlock your phone every time you want to dim the lights, it’s a bit of a faff. Other functions don’t require your phone to be unlocked. Want to snap a fast photo? You can do that without unlocking. Need to pay at a shop counter? No need to unlock there either when you’re using ApplePay (providing it’s less than a set amount). But when you want to adjust the lights, or put the heating on you have to fumble around unlocking the phone, going to the app and sliding the toggle. Read more

By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Do It Yourself • Home Entertainment • Management • Tips and Tricks • Uncategorized • • 0 Comments

Getting the most out of your Google Assistant

google assistant, smart home assistant, smart home automationGoogle Assistant can help with almost anything these days, including looking up your old photos, helping you find new podcasts to fall in love with, and finding your phone.
If you’re forgetful or absent minded and you’ve got a Google Assistant then you’ll most likely already know how to use your Google Assistant to remind you to do things but there’s a whole world of things your Smart Assistant can help with.

Making lists and notes

First of all you’ll need to add an app such as Google Keep, Any.do, or Bring to your Google Assistant. Keeping things on brand will probably cause the least friction, and Google Keep is a great resource for keeping everything online you want to read, listen to, or watch later in one place. Even before you start adding your own lists or sheets to it, you can identify any websites you find with labels of your own, making them easy to organise. Read more

By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • Home Entertainment 0 Comments

How Changing Broadband Providers Always Gets You A Better Deal*

broadband speed, ISP, internet service provider, wireless data, fibre broadbandThe benefits of switching broadband provider, energy, and phone company can’t be overstated. Many suppliers offer outstanding deals with new contracts, but have standard contracts which are so bad they almost appear to penalise customer loyalty. You don’t get discounts which are available to new sign-ups, the customer service you receive is often rubbish, and in the case of broadband customers, despite paying more than newer customers you’re stuck with an old router which was never top of the line in the first place, meaning that you simply aren’t getting the speeds new customers do.

Shopping around means that you’ve putting yourself in line for those great deals. Many broadband providers depend on complacency and laziness among the majority of their customers. If it’s too much of a faff to shop around for a better deal, and when you find one, it’s difficult to get out of your contract, or migrating over means losing your phone number unless you pay a fee, then you’re likely to stay with them despite a better deal being within reach.

But if you’re out of your minimum contract period and you’re just paying a rolling fee to keep getting data, why not see what other deals are out there? Better prices, brand new hardware and better customer service are all ripe for the picking! Read more

By Dan Cash Construction • Design • Do It Yourself • Home Cinema • Home Entertainment • Tips and Tricks • • • 0 Comments

Create Your Own Temporary Outdoor Home Cinema

home cinema, home theatre, outdoor, projector, projection screenDrive-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

By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • CCTV • Home Entertainment • WiFi • 0 Comments

The Smarter The Home, The Bigger & Better The Broadband

ultrafast broadband, broadband, internet, dataWe love all things Smart Home, and have jumped fully aboard the Smart Home Automation revolution. But there is one drawback: You need a broadband subscription if your automated kit is going to work. With most suppliers that comes with the hidden fee of a phone line rental, and then, if you want to operate your Smart Tech remotely you need data for your phone as well, which means another data hungry contract.

While we can’t help with the phone contract, Briant Broadband can help with the data in your home!

Briant Broadband is a new data supply company operating two minutes walk from Worthing town centre which offers a local service based on delivering ultrafast broadband data at an competitive price point but with the benefit of experience and customer service that you only get a family run Worthing business with engineers and installers who live in the area. Read more