Giganet (Cityfibre FTTP)

Been looking at Giganet for a while now and thinking of signing up, I see they ain’t the cheapest FTTP I can get but reviews seem really good, anyone have any experience with them on FTTP using cityfibre, also I’ve read on here that zens backhaul is to be avoided why is this and do Giganet use them? Thanks.

I'm not aware of any provider who uses Zen backhaul over CityFibre (apart from Zen themselves, obviously).
Giganet definitely do not use Zen.

Hello

I have Giganet one of the best ISP's I have had for years. They use the cityfibre network and BT.

I've been with Giganet 950 on CF since about march. So far so good - no issues with Giganet themselves. Great speed and low latency.

Had an incident which I had to get support involved in when ParcelForce reversed into and destroyed CF's street cabinet. Giganet were good and responsive on the phone and ticket system. They got CF involved quickly, although it took a little longer to fix than I would have liked (not helped by the extra bank holiday in September) but considering most of the the fibers had been snapped so had to re-blown, it was a bit of a big job and certainly not the fault of Giganet. I will say that I haven't seen any of the promised compensation from that incident yet though (maybe the next bill may reflect it, if not back onto support!)...

Edited by philg (Mon 17-Oct-22 00:23:53)

Sounds good I have heard lots of good things about them, I see they do the top package of 900 but some providers I’ve looked at go to 1000 do you know why this is, do you still get the same speed if you went with the 1000 providers or do you actually lose that speed if you go for the ones that advertise at 900, also what’s your ping like I suppose this depends where you live though. Thanks.

I see just I’ve read a lot on here about avoiding the zen backhaul maybe this isn’t a thing when using cityfibre then if that’s the case happy days.

Sounds great that, I’ve been looking around though and see some providers go up to 1000 on cityfibre and Giganet are at 900, does this mean you lose that speed if you don’t go for the higher one or is it just the way they advertise the package and there all the same, you mention your on 950 highest I see is a 900 package?.

Sorry, yes you are right, it is the 900 package, on the account page its called "Gig Full Fibre"... But generally, on decent speedtests I get >900 (most of the time) in both directions. I guess its probably a marketing/not wanting to over promise/ASA restrictions/average thing that they call it 900!

Yeah that’s true maybe they want to call it a 900 package so they don’t over hype it and you don’t get that or something, I’ve noticed a lot of providers call it a 1000 package but some 900, what speed do you normally get on a test, also when I check installation dates with Giganet they always seem to be the quickest to install most are like 8 days wait Giganet seems to be a few days wait maybe they’ve got there own installers or something did you find this, how long was your wait?.

Speed tests vary depending on where the servers are (obviously). The speed test here on TBB right now: 832(dn)/909(up), and Ookla 916(dn) / 924(up). It also depends on equipment. The Giganet router had no problems with speed but I don't use it as I like more control and have quite a complex network setup internally with a couple of servers, multiple Lan-Lan VPNs and backup connections - not your typical "resident!"). My old (Vigor) router struggled to maintain >800mbps esp with IPv6 enabled, but my new OPNSense box is pretty powerful and has no such problems.

But do be aware, your not going to see gigabit speeds everywhere, for example, xbox game downloads, don't appear to be much different from my previous 350Mbit virgin connection likely because Microsofts CDN limits speed per connection etc. But I can do more at the same time as downloading that >50Gb game. I do sometimes wonder if its worth having more than 500mbit but its nice...

Decent upload speeds and stable latency/jitter is probably more important to me personally (Virgin being diabolical on that front). My pings on giganet are nice and low and stable even under load typically 5ms to bbc.co.uk (ipv6 which is interesting slightly lower latency than IPv4 - that may be my equipment) - it will depend where you are in the UK I guess - I'm not that far from London.

There is also the fact that its a contended service as is all residential broadband. There are 20 properties on my street with one cabinet and the CF network as a whole is brand new still with (too) many roadworks around . Right now I think (complete guess) only 3 or 4 of us are using CF on my cabinet - so I do wonder how it will degrade as more people join up.

I think, to most people, the impact of the difference between 900 and 1000 is relatively insignificant (compare to the massively noticeable difference between 10 and 110 mbit for example).

As for wait times, I'm not sure I can answer that with any certainty. I only had a choice between two ISP's Giganet and Zen here at the time (there are more now), I don't think there was much difference although I think I waited longer than 8 days (and I'm pretty sure I was aware it would be longer than that when I ordered). Giganet at the time gave me the impression that I was one of their first customers in my area (CF had only lit the street a few weeks prior and Giganet implied that they were still running tests in the area before installations could begin - not sure how accurate that information was!

They (giganet) do not use their own installers - it was all CF's contractors (Kellys Coms) here, same when the parcelforce van destroyed the cabinet, kellys were the ones to investigate/fix it.