UltraBEAM Speed Guarantee

Giganet voluntarily provides an added "speed guarantee" for our Home Full Fibre UltraBEAM broadband services. This is our way to provide reassurance to you that you'll receive the fastest speeds possible on our full fibre ultrafast 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. 

Further-more, 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.

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

Speed Guarantee 

How to test your speed

The Speed Guarantee refers to the speed from the Giganet network to your UltraHUB 2 (the router we've provided you). Our guarantee does not cover the speed you receive from the UltraHUB 2 to your devices in your home, nor if you are using a different router to the one we've bundled.

1. Ensure no one else is using the connection whilst you're running the test.
2. Connect a computer with a direct Ethernet cable to the UltraHUB 2 router we have provided. PLEASE DO NOT TEST ON WI-FI as this won't count.
   • This computer must be up to date, modern, and generally capable of running the speed tests. So if your computer is slow, old, or bloated with lots of applications and data, then this test will not be accurate.
   • Make sure your computer is connecting to the router at 1Gb/s speeds. Older laptops may only link at 100Mb/s - if so, then the test will not be accurate.
3. Run a speedtest on www.speedtest.net - we recommend manually selecting the London - Community Fibre server (as this has known good performance (we've tested speeds of 9Gb/s to it from our core!)).
   • Alternatively, please run a speed test via our checker - https://speedtest.giga.net.uk/ - this is in BETA and may not yet be providing accurate results.

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 would provide an average)
  • Describe your computer set up (make, model, operating system, internet browser (e.g. Chrome/Firefox)
  • How it 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 as a one-off credit.
• If we are unable to restore the speeds above the guaranteed levels within 90 days, then you may exit the contract early without penalty.

Things completely outside of our control

Do remember that things like:

• Your Wi-Fi signal, or interference with your neighbours WiFi
• Your computers, tablets, mobile phones, other networked devices
• Your internal network
• The internet, websites, other third party servers

are all completely out of our control and may influence the speeds you observe.

The speeds we are checking are between a hard cabled connection to the router and the internet. We cannot provide guarantee speeds on Wi-Fi, as this is so variable

Hard cabled speeds are fine but Wi-Fi speeds are not

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

However, due to the variable nature of wireless signals, the Wi-Fi standards your devices support, interference of the wireless signals, and many things that can block the signal (walls, ceilings, floors, metal object, 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 UltraBEAM is a full-fibre service.

But 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' and is unlike more expensive dedicated business leased lines. Being a 'shared network' 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.

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

• Broadband runs on a 'shared (capacity) network':
  • Unlike dedicated business leased line connections - broadband services - of which UltraBEAM is 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 many orders of magnitude 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.
• UltraBEAM (and all other Openreach based services) run 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.
  • GPON offers up to 2.488Gb/s download bandwidth (speed) and 1.244 Gb/s upload bandwidth per PON port. This PON bandwidth is shared with up to 32 other people 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 UltraBEAM 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.
• The Internet is a 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.