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 Do It Yourself • Energy Saving • General Information • Home Cinema • Home Entertainment • Tips and Tricks • WiFi • • • • 0 Comments

Prepare & Position Your TV To Get The Best Picture Possible

flat screen TV, television, installation, wall, wall hangingPeople admit to watching around three hours of TV a day, but we all know the reality is that while you might only remember watching TV for that long many of us switch the TV on when we get in and probably won’t turn it off again until we go to bed. It keeps the kids quiet after school, then there’s the soaps, followed by the news, then a movie and before you know it you’ve been watching television for six hours. Maybe not really concentrating, but still, that’s a quarter of your day when the TV has been on.

Considering how large a part television plays in our homelife today it’s important that you choose the right one for you. In the days when we only had one big TV per household the choice was easy, pick one which was big enough to be seen from the other side of the room and put it where it wouldn’t get glare from the sun streaming through the window. But things change. We now have more channels via Freeview, Freesat and Sky than we could ever hope to watch, and that’s before we even begin thinking about Netflix, Hulu (via a VPN), YouTube, and streaming sites.

There is choice not only in size, but in picture quality too, both factors which naturally affect the price of the television set you ultimately end up bringing into your home.

Simple economics would dictate that you get the biggest screen for the lowest price if you want to score yourself a bargain, but in reality that’s far from the case. A large TV in a small room will absolutely overpower the space and you won’t be able to get physically far enough away from the screen in order to be able to enjoy the picture. The rule of thumb is that the screen should be positioned one and a half to three times the screen’s diameter from your head. So if you have a 70cm screen the closest you would want to be from it is just over a metre, and the furthest you would want to sit would be approximately 2 metres. You would most likely want to sit within a 30 degree angle of the screen. Flat screen TVs are made up of laminated layers which perform a different task in the makeup of your picture. Increase the angle you’re watching at too far from 90 degrees and your view of the layers goes out of phase, meaning that colours change or invert entirely. Read more