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

Choosing Your Next Broadband Provider: Top Tips

Image courtesy of https://www.freeimages.com/photo/working-woman-1440176 working from home, contractless broadband, wireless, full fibreFinding 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

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

Full Fibre Makes You A Winner When It Comes To Gaming

local broadband, fast broadband, Worthing broadband, full fibreAny 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

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

Have Great Broadband, But Still Have Slow Wi-Fi?

Installing A Mesh Network Could Be Your Solution To Wi-Fi Shadows And Dark Spotsmesh disk, mesh network, broadband network, home network, home broadband

While your broadband provider gives you incredible internet access speeds, you may find that too many users at the same time and the distance you are from your router can have a significant effect on the speed that you’re able to surf the web. What can you do about it?

Several things can affect the speed you get when you’re actually browsing, the distance from your router, the number of people trying to use the internet at the same time, walls, or even heavy furniture can all have a detrimental effect. While the position of your router is important, there are some things which just can’t be overcome that way, so you may need to invest in a mesh network to solve dark spots.

The Further You Go The Slower The Flow

Wireless routers can only deliver a strong signal for a limited range. As you get toward the extent of that range you will see speeds slowing as the weaker signal affects the amount of data your devices can receive. The router is designed to have a limited range as making them more powerful would mean that householders would find that all their neighbours’ Wi-Fi signal was coming through as strongly as their own, which causes a variety of problems including ‘noise’, interference and tethering problems for devices which automatically connect to the strongest signal.

So people living in a larger than average home, or who want to extend their Wi-Fi’s reach into the garden have to find a way of broadening the reach of their reception. One of the best solutions available at the moment is a mesh network, a series of devices (usually in the form of ‘disks’ or ‘satellites’) which can be dotted around the home to improve signal wherever you are. Read more

By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • Management • WiFi • • • 0 Comments

How Wireless Technology Continues To Help You Work From Home

wireless, wireless broadband, superfast broadband, broadband, internet, ISPAre you going to be affected by the train strikes this week, and a proposed teacher’s strike later on in the year?

The post-Covid recovery didn’t last long, did it? We were hoping that we could all get back to work, the economy would level out and we’d all be looking at better future, free of lockdowns and masks.

But what Covid did show us was that we’re OK working from home if it’s not possible to get into the office. In fact the structure for many offices has changed with meetings in the same building being conducted online, making sharing documents, visualisations and other assets immediately available to everyone. No need to find a meeting room and drag everyone away from their desk, making the meeting as low-impact as possible.

The only drawback for many people who have to commute, even if it’s just a few stops is the quality of internet they get. People living and working in Worthing, Hove, Brighton, and Chichester are lucky enough to get the latest broadband technology. On the other hand people living in the sticks have to suffer with technology which hasn’t been updated for decades, and was never designed to handle the amount of traffic that an online community working from home need. Briant Broadband’s Wireless internet service is the answer to that. Read more

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

Why Should You Choose Briant Broadband?

When you’re shopping around for a new broadband internet service provider there are a range of different things you need: speed, reliability, and a good price. The great thing is, Briant Broadband has that and more.

Briant Broadband provides a wide range of different plans, more than just about any other broadband provider on the market. We pride ourselves on our flexibility when it comes to the service we provide to our customers. When you take out a plan with Briant Broadband you’re not tied into a contract like you are with other providers. If you find that the plan you start with turns out to be unsuitable you can change it. If it’s too expensive you can go to a slower package for which we charge less, or, if you’re not getting the speed you need you can move to a faster plan. We’ll adjust your bill accordingly, but we won’t charge you an admin fee for changing. You can also pause your package if you’re going to be away from home for 30 days or more, because we don’t expect you to pay for something you’re not using.

How does that equate to so many plans? Well, because we have several plans stretching from £22 per month to £40 per month it makes it easier for our customers to budget. So if you found that your 100 Mbps plan was too slow the next level up is our 150 Mbps which is only a few pounds more. Without the range of plans to choose from the next stage up would cost at least £10 a month more. Read more

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

Broadband Data Prices Are On The Rise, But Not At Briant’s!

The cost of living is going up, and there seems to be very little we can do about it. Energy providers are shutting down and making it almost impossible to shop around for other companies. There are gaps on the shelves of supermarkets as products and the ingredients necessary to make our own foods are stuck at borders, making food more expensive over-all, and now, to follow suit, all the big name broadband providers are hiking their prices too.

If you’re with Virgin you have the opportunity to quit your contract by 18th of February because they don’t have a clause in their broadband data contract with lets them put their prices up annually, meaning that one their price rises are announce they have to give their customers the chance to opt out.

If you’re with any of the other main broadband internet providers your options are rather more limited as they do have clauses in their contracts which allow them to increase how much you pay.

And if you’re affected by the price rises, you could face having to find a lot more for your broadband data. Depending on your provider and the contract you’re in, it could see your bill going up by more than 20%. That can be more than £50 per year for many users, users who, according to many comments on Facebook and Twitter are generally unhappy with the levels of reliability, customer service, and professionalism shown at many levels, including call centres, help desks, and engineers. Read more

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

Switching Broadband Providers Is Going To Get Much Easier

image courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@magellol - broadband, changing providers, switch, digital switch, isp, wisp, As with many services, such as your bank, energy or water supplier, the rigmarole, hassle and mistakes which can occur when switching are often the most common reasons people give for not wanting to switch. That is true for broadband data too, or at least it will be until April 2023 when Ofcom introduce the “One Touch Switch” (OTS) service for broadband consumers. OTS, which is currently modelled on the template available to landline phone users takes all of the bother out of the process of switching from one ISP to another, so it will certainly be welcomed by digital data users looking for a better deal.

Currently it’s necessary to deal with both your new and old internet service provider, you’ll be setting up one account and making sure there is as little overlap as you leave your old provider, while also making sure there is no service gap between leaving one and starting with the next either.

Instead the OTS system means that all you will have to do is contact the company you want to have a new contract with and they will arrange the rest.

Depending on which service you want to take up, switching can currently be very easy, provided you are moving from a like to like service with the same infrastructure. Problems arise though when you want to switch to a company which is on a different physical network from the one you’re currently on. As a broadband data provider we, and Ofcom, feel that switching should be as easy and transparent for you the consumer as possible. You don’t care about infrastructure interface, Code Powers, or Physical Infrastructure Access, you just want to get better broadband as quickly as possible. It’s our job to care about that, and then to get you the fastest broadband data as quickly and efficiently as possible. Read more

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

Get More From Your Broadband Data, Even With Data Hungry Visitors

local broadband, fast broadband, Worthing broadbandA simple way to protect many of your Smart Home devices is to attach them to a guest network rather than the Wi-Fi network you use your broadband to connect with the internet. It’s more secure to connect your smart devices in this way as they are less vulnerable to hacking or scanning, where an outsider looks at the online devices, and scans them for usernames and passwords which haven’t been properly secured. They’re not absolutely invulnerable, but keeping them off of the network which you use to connect your computer to the internet reduces the risks of them being easily accessed.

There are plenty of other very good reasons to set up a guest network on your router as well. For guests, for example.

Make Your Broadband Easy To Use, For The Right People

When you have visitors who all want to connect their phones or laptops to the internet the easiest thing is to make your network password free. Clearly a terrible idea! Instead, the wisest and best thing would be to create a guest network that they can connect to instead of the one you use to connect to the internet. They can connect using a basic password which is easy to remember, and in no way similar to the long, complex passwords you use for your own devices. Making the password easy to remember means that you won’t have to keep re-sending it or resetting it because someone is always forgetting it. Another feature of a guest network is that it prevents those on it from accessing shared folders, printers, and any wireless storage devices which you keep on your regular Wi-Fi network. What that means is that you can keep on doing all your usual stuff on your ‘Home’ network without having to worry about people who’ve access to the ‘Guest’ network seeing anything they shouldn’t. A guest network means you’re able to do that without having to go about changing and adding additional security to all your personal stuff. Read more

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

What is Fibre Broadband, and How Exactly Does It Go So Fast?

fibre, fibre optic, fibre optic broadband, briant broadband, superfast internet, ultra fast internet Everyone by now knows what fibre optic cable is, but do they know how it works and why it’s so much faster than cable or wireless digital broadband?

In the 1980s telephone companies started putting fibre optic cables under the ground instead of copper cable. The benefit was that the media, glass, was much cheaper than metal, could carry vastly more information, and carry it over much greater distances without the need for signal boosters, switches or repeaters. Copper wire had been in use since the days of the telegraph, and it was quite sufficient when it wasn’t common for every home to have a phone, and the only signal that it had to carry was the voices of the two people having a conversation.

With the advent of the micro-computer, the internet and world wide web, the needs of the infrastructure changed, so the phone company started using fibre optics instead of copper. But if you were using a home computer in the 90s once it became more common for a home to have a computer and internet access you might not have seen much in the way of ‘fast internet’ as we understand it today. Your computer will have still been connected to your modem via a copper cable, and that dial-up modem will have been connected to local exchange via metal cable. Hubs and servers all over the world would be connected by fibre optic lines, but there was still so much metal in the system that the full speed potential could never be reached.

That’s changing very rapidly now. The internet is no longer regarded simply as a useful tool, it’s become so much a part of our lives that it is being considered by many to be a utility, just like gas, electricity and water. Consequently, in order to provide the kind of speed people need to make the internet serviceable, notwithstanding however many people are all using it at the same time, it’s necessary to ensure that as many people have access to fibre all the way up to their property, or an equally acceptable alternative. Read more

By Dan Cash Management • WiFi • • • 0 Comments

Briant Broadband For Housing Blocks, HMOs And Developments

local broadband, fast broadband, Worthing broadbandIt’s in no way unusual for a home of multiple occupancy (HMO), apartment block or housing development to run from a single communal television receiver or satellite dish. Companies such as Briant Communications install, repair and maintain those all the time and the benefits are obvious: Professional, insured and guaranteed work and parts, accountability, dealing with a single operator, their familiarity with you, your properties and purchasing process are all a far better proposition than having residents finding their own unvetted, unknown, unprofessional installers scaling the walls, drilling holes and hanging uninsured, untested, equipment sourced from who-knows-where.

If you follow our blog you’ll have seen some of the before and after photos we’ve shared. From multiple aerial and sky dish installations which have been an ongoing amateur project for years, undertaken by any number of bodgers, home-handymen and DIYers to splitters and cable installations which look like high tech birds’ nests shoved into lofts and cupboards under stairs before being abandoned. The photos don’t only show that our engineers take making the installation look good, we ensure that the kit works properly and any subsequent engineer who has to work with it will know it was a job well done, will see immediately where each cable goes, what switch does what and, ideally, be able to fix whatever broke immediately and with the least amount of fuss. Read more