By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Construction • Renovation • • • 0 Comments

Full Fibre Broadband Without The Need For Digging Disruption

full fibre, cityfibre, pole, telegraph pole, broadband, full fibre broadbandGetting 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

By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • Construction • Energy Saving • General Information • Renovation • • 0 Comments

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

internet, broadband, data, computer,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

By Dan Cash Do It Yourself • Energy Saving • General Information • Renovation • Tips and Tricks • • 0 Comments

Can You Make Your Kitchen ‘Smart’ Without Brand New Appliances?

Modern white kitchen with white marble counter top and pendant lighting.Smart devices around the home are a boon, of course, but they can be especially helpful in the kitchen. The oven that already knows how to cook the perfect chicken, the fridge which you can peer into to see if you need milk while you’re actually in the dairy section of the supermarket, and the bin which updates your shopping list when you throw packaging into the recycling certainly make keeping ahead of the housekeeping easy.

But can you do it without investing in brand new white goods?

If you’re refitting your kitchen with a raft of new appliances it is certainly tempting to buy those which have all the Smart Tech available already installed: Fridges with built in cameras, ovens which are programmed to know the cooking times of all your favourite meals, along with cameras and sensors which know when your roast has reached the perfect shade of brown, even bins with barcode readers which can order grocery deliveries for you because it knows you through your rubbish.

But what if your budget doesn’t stretch that far? Or you want to Smarten up your kitchen, only you don’t want to junk all your old appliances just yet? Can you get the same usability without buying the latest goods? Read more

By Dan Cash Construction • Do It Yourself • Renovation • Tips and Tricks • • • • 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

By Dan Cash Design • Do It Yourself • General Information • Home Entertainment • Renovation • • • • 0 Comments

Our Latest “Before And After” Cable Installation

before & after, cable installation, rewiring, satellite, aerial, TV, television, expert, professional, skilled engineerWe make mention a lot about our ‘professional cable installation‘ and you may wonder why. After all, it’s just putting cables under floors and behind walls, no big deal, right?

If you look at these before and after photos from a recent job our engineers undertook you’ll start to see why it’s so important to do the job properly. Various different installers of varying degrees of expertise all seem to have had a go at this in the past.
It’s easy be break or damage a cable, especially if you don’t know where it is, and that’s why professional cable installation is so important, whether it’s in your HMO, apartment block, office or industrial unit. Read more

By Dan Cash Broadband • Design • Do It Yourself • General Information • Renovation • WiFi • • • 0 Comments

Building, Renovating Or Refurbing? We Need To Talk About Data Cable!

fibre installation, fibre optic, ultrafast fibre dataWhether you’re renovating an old building, adding an extension, or building a new project from the ground up, it’s always a good idea to think about futureproofing. You wouldn’t leave electric wiring or plumbing out and add it as an afterthought, so why leave data cable to last?

Can installing digital infrastructure really be considered ‘futureproofing’ at all? We can all see how digital broadband data is here to stay, the only question is, how much of it we’re going to need as we become ever more data hungry? Ten years ago you would have been happy for one computer in your house to get fast access to Facebook to see who had most recently thrown a sheep at you or poked you (no, nobody knew then, nobody knows now. It was just one of those things), but today we need ‘instant on’ when we’re streaming movies, watching online TV, downloading and sharing music, and of course, checking our news feed on Facebook… And that’s not even considering the data that’s needed for Smart Home Automation devices and the demands that Covid has put on us in regards to working from home, always being in & needing to find ways of entertaining the kids and breaking up the Groundhog Day-like monotony of lockdown after lockdown. Putting all those aspects of modern home life and, together with Moore’s Law that technology becomes cheaper, faster and smaller with every passing year, it’s hard to imagine what the home without a broadband spine leading from the router to the street, or a strong, stable ultrafast wireless broadband connection would look like to Future Us. Read more

By Dan Cash CCTV • Construction • Design • Do It Yourself • Home Cinema • Home Entertainment • Home Security • Renovation • WiFi • • • 0 Comments

Our Finishing Touches Turn D-I-Y Into D-I-WOW!

home entertainment, barn conversion, home office, work from home, wifi extenders, mesh networkWhile Covid has kept millions of people at home with nothing to do DIY projects all over the country have finally been completed. Stuck at home, entertainment has been at a premium. With no reason to put all those niggling little jobs off, and all the time that could never be found before shelves have been going up, doors touched up and re-hung, bedrooms painted and bathrooms re-grouted. And then there are the people who like to get their teeth stuck into the big jobs!

A marvellous example of ‘finally getting around-to-it’ is this exceptional outhouse we recently tricked out with home entertainment, internet & TV in Wonersh, a beautiful little village not far from Guildford in Surrey.

Creating Workspaces You Want To Enjoy Spending Spare Time In

The homeowners wanted a space where they could ‘break out’ when they got sick of being trapped indoors, but with all the access to modern technology that we’ve all become used to. It’s a space to relax, and to work, but it also needs to be secure. A perfect scenario for for Briant Communications! Read more

By Dan Cash General Information • Renovation • WiFi 0 Comments

Briant Broadband: Ultrafast Broadband Internet From A Local Business

fibre installation, fibre optic, ultrafast fibre dataBriant Communications isn’t just about TV aerials, satellite dishes and smart home security installation. We are now in the process of developing an arm of the business which will supply competitively priced broadband internet at ultrafast speeds to businesses and households in Worthing and the surrounding districts.

We’ve teamed up with several partners to ensure that we are able to provide data either by fibre to the door, or via wireless transmitters and receivers to people living in our wider neighbourhood. These partnerships include the help and cooperation of property owners who have agreed to allow us to locate a site on the roof of one of their new developments. This partnership holds benefits for both us as a supplier, and for the property management service. Read more

By Dan Cash CCTV • Design • Do It Yourself • General Information • Home Security • Renovation • Tips and Tricks • WiFi • • • 0 Comments

Keeping Kerb Appeal Flowing When Selling Your Home

kerb appeal, garden, cctv, home security, bathroom, selling, housebuying

You’ll undoubtedly have heard the expression “Kerb appeal,” the makeover you give your house to make it attractive and give potential buyers a warm, positive feeling about your property before they’ve even stepped through the gate. It’s something agents and vendors bang on about all the time, but how can you get it, and how do you keep that positive feeling going up to and beyond exchanging contracts?

The fundamental thing about kerb appeal is making the house and garden look like the sort of place the buyer can see themselves living in without having to lift a finger. Even if they think they’re looking for a ‘fixer-upper’ most buyers will be daunted, to say the least if the property looks like a building site which has been abandoned or worse yet, a derelict which is rotting before their eyes.

So What Do You Do To Make That Unforgettable First Impression?

It’s a truism that you have to speculate to accumulate, so you’re naturally going to have to put money and effort into the appearance of your house if you want to get the best price for it, but naturally you don’t want to waste money on baubles which won’t make a difference to the impression you make or price you finally achieve. Read more

By Dan Cash Design • Do It Yourself • Energy Saving • General Information • Home Entertainment • Home Security • Renovation • Tips and Tricks • • • 0 Comments

Running Out Of Space At Home? Don’t Move, Improve!

We’d all love to live in a luxury home with all the mod cons and labour saving devices that come with a life of leisure, but few of us can afford it. If you don’t have the money to move house, but you still want the trappings of a luxury lifestyle there are always ways and means. Create a budget, shop around for bargains and muck in, doing as much of the work yourself as you can and you could improve your home so much you won’t even want to move home!

If you’ve ever been channel surfing at about 7pm on a weeknight you’ve probably seen an episode of Buying and Selling with Drew and Jonathan Scott, a show where two unrealistically handsome twins, one the rugged construction guy type, the other the smart lawyer looking one, renovate a family’s old home and bring the value up so much they can afford to leap several rungs up the property ladder. The thing that often grabs me is, after the work they put into making the old place look fantastic, why bother moving at all?

Transforming the home is something which is essentially within anybody’s reach, unless you live somewhere that is so tumbledown that it needs serious restoration, and if that’s the case, this isn’t the blog for you!

On the other hand, if your home is just looking tired, dated, shabby and doesn’t conform to your needs any more, why not look at other ways you can get the most out of it without selling up and moving on? (And if you still want to move on, do those improvements anyway, the work you carry out is proven to add to the overall value of the house, meaning you get what everybody wants when moving house: options.) Read more