Full Fibre Speed Guarantee

Giganet voluntarily provides an added "speed guarantee" for our full fibre home broadband services. This is our way to give you reassurance that you'll receive the fastest speeds possible on our full fibre services.

If your broadband speeds fall below the guaranteed levels, as tested with a hard wired Gigabit Ethernet connection to our router, and we can't resolve this within 28 days, then we'll provide you with a one-off £20 credit on your account if you make a claim against this speed guarantee. 

Furthermore, if we cannot resolve the speed problem within 90 days of first being notified, we'll allow you to exit the contract without penalty, should you wish to leave.

Our speed guarantee covers the speed between your broadband router (that we provided), and our core network. It does not extend to any Wi-Fi connections throughout your home.

Speed Guarantee 

How to test your speed

• Broadband Speed Test Instructions

The speed guarantee refers to the speed from the Giganet network to your UltraHub 2 (the router we've provided). It does not cover the speed to your devices in your home, Wi-Fi speeds, nor if you are using a different router to the one we've bundled.

Click here for instructions and recommendations on how to accurately test your broadband connection speed.

How to claim against the speed guarantee

• If the tested speeds are lower than our guarantee, please raise a support ticket here.
  • Please share with us a screenshot of the speed results gathered (multiple tests are helpful).
  • Describe your computer set up (make, model, operating system, internet browser (e.g. Chrome/Firefox).
  • How your device was connected to the router (e.g. Gigabit Ethernet connection).
  • Whether your computer was connected at 1Gb/s network speeds.
  • Whether no other users were connecting or using your connection whilst running the tests.
  • Whether the speed changes at various points in the day.
  • Whether you have tried disabling temporarily any antivirus/firewalls (YOUR RISK) has an impact on your speeds?
• Our support team will work with you to investigate and attempt to resolve the problem.
• If we are unable to restore the speeds above the guaranteed levels within 28 days, then you may ask for a £20 credit which will be applied to your account.
• If we are unable to restore the speeds above the guaranteed levels within 90 days, then you may exit your contract early, without penalty.

Things completely outside of our control and unlikely to qualify against the speed guarantee

The scenarios below will all result in an inaccurate test result.

If you test your connection as such, you will not be testing the underlying Giganet broadband service, but moreover your readings will be inaccurate as swayed by the other factor (be it Wi-Fi or your old computer that only has a 100Mb/s ethernet port).

Please therefore ensure you follow our recommended speed test instructions for the greatest accuracy.

• Testing over a Wi-Fi connection
• Testing over a powerline adapter (Ethernet over mains)
• Testing to an unverified speed test website
• Testing using an old computer with limited performance or 1Gb/s network card
• Testing whilst others are using your connection

Wi-Fi speeds are considerably slower

We appreciate that most of our customers will be using your internet connection over Wi-Fi, rather than hard cabled into the router for convenience.

However, due to the variable nature of Wi-Fi radio waves, the Wi-Fi version that your devices may support, possible sources of interference in and outside of your home (neighbours Wi-Fi signals/ microwave ovens), and many things that can weaken/block the Wi-Fi radio signals (walls, ceilings, floors, radiators, foil-backed insulation, large white goods, large furniture, etc), we sadly cannot provide a speed guarantee for your Wi-Fi connections.

Please see this article for further help and advice about optimising your Wi-Fi signal.

Difference between anticipated speed and guaranteed speed

You may be wondering why there is a difference between the anticipated and guaranteed speeds, especially as we provide a full fibre service.

Before we go into the technical details, it's worth emphasising that Giganet never aims to be the bottleneck with any customer connection, be it home or business services. We always ensure that for elements within our control (interconnects to broadband networks, core network, and interconnects to the wider internet), we over-provision capacity so that we're not the ones causing any customer slow-downs. In short, we don't run our network 'hot' and at the limits or over our capacity.

However, broadband is a 'shared network' unlike more expensive dedicated business leased lines.

With broadband being a 'shared network', it helps keep prices low.

With broadband, network capacity is shared (and 'dimensioned' to use a technical term), to what the maximum anticipated usage will be in a given town, fibre exchange, or ISP core network. In some rare cases, an unanticipated increased in broadband usage can exceed the network capacity that's been provisioned; the result being that some will have slower speeds for what hopefully would be a very short period, until the extra usage subsides.

Technical reasons why your speed may be lower than the "anticipated/headline speeds".

• Broadband runs on a 'shared network':
  • Unlike dedicated business leased line connections - broadband services operate over a shared network. This helps to keep prices down for everyone. This is the same for all other broadband providers and broadband networks, and is not unique to Giganet. Simply, if broadband networks were all dedicated, and there was a 1:1 ratio of customer's speeds, and the capacity available in the networks, then the pricing would be vastly more expensive.
  • This shared capacity is evident throughout the network, from the full fibre GPON network in your street, to the backhaul from the local fibre exchange to our core network, within our core network, and our interconnects to the wider internet.
• Our Full Fibre broadband services operate over a GPON network:
  • GPON - or Gigabit Passive Optical Network is where a fibre cable from the local exchange routes to a passive fibre splitter.
  • This splitter shares the single fibre uplink to the exchange with up to 32 other nearby premises. 32 is the maximum, but the actual number could be much lower depending on how many other services are active on that splitter. E.g. if your street only has 5 people connected to the 32:1 splitter, than the ratio is 5:1, not 32:1. This example is simplistic, but explains the idea.
  • Each GPON uplink from the splitter to the exchange offers up to 2.488Gb/s download bandwidth (speed) and 1.244 Gb/s upload bandwidth. This PON bandwidth is shared with the 'up to' 32 other connections that route via the same splitter as your connection.
  • Therefore in the most extreme (but incredible unlikely) scenario that all 32 connections were active, they were all subscribed to our top Full Fibre 1000 service, and were all downloading and uploading at the maximum possible rate, then the maximum available theoretical bandwidth is 77Mb/s download and 38.88Mb/s upload for each customer.
  • This theoretical but incredible unlikely worst case scenario would still enable you to stream 4K UHD TV, game, send emails, video call with plenty of extra capacity for others in your property to also do the same.
• The Internet is a massive shared network:
  • The Internet is essentially a collection of other networks, with websites and servers at one end, and customers and devices at the other.
  • Giganet connects to the Internet at various points such as Internet exchanges (LONAP and LINX) as well as to multiple Tier 1 transit networks.
  • From there, traffic routes via a serious of other third party networks that are outside of our control.
  • At each point in the Internet, there is only so much capacity, and in times of demand, this may outstrip the capacity available.
  • Giganet doesn't control the internet, and so if there are any slowdowns caused by the internet at large, or certain websites, then this is something that we'd be unable to assist with. 
• Speedtest.net and other speed test website services are contended/shared too:
  • An increasing amount of speed test websites are cropping up online that may not have the capacity to support many 1000s of customers with very high capacity lines all doing speed tests at the same time.