And not the type you have for breakfast. It would have been hard not to notice the roads of Emsworth being dug up over the last very many months. The road works are down to a company called GigaNet who are installing fibre telecoms connections into Emsworth and other parts of Hampshire and Dorset.

The move to fibre will result in quite a lot of changes for us the users of broadband. Currently,in Emsworth, you could get your broadband connection from Virgin or OpenReach. If using OpenReach you would subscribe to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) such as BT, PlusNet, TalkTalk or Zen.

GigaNet (those are the ones digging up our roads) are currently like Virgin in that they provide the fibre and are also the ISP. GigaNet will have some good deals when they are ready to launch their service but moving to them will have some ramifications. If you use one of the current ISP’s email addresses then you will loose it. There has been a lot of concern about the loss of a landline with the move to fibre. Some providers do offer a landline option (BT, ZEN) but others don’t. GigaNet are in the don’t category but point you to third party providers. The third party options can work well and also offer services that you can’t get with a fixed landline but implementation can be difficult.

The only way to move from a current bundled landline and broadband contract to a solution from GigaNet and keep your landline number is to have the fibre installed and once it is working move the landline to a third party voice provider. When you contract the landline move the old broadband line will be cancelled. To connect your house telephones to the new landline you will need an adapter (which some third parties can supply) or a telephone system that support “IP Telephony”.

GigaNet have a good reputation as an ISP but researching their reviews it seems that 80% of customers think they a excellent but 20% think they are very poor with not much in between. The 20% with poor experiences are almost always down to failed installations so perhaps they still have a lot to learn regarding the installation process.

So, with all those difficulties why bother. Well fibre is faster and more reliable and if you move house, from September 2023, you won’t be able to order one of the old style telephone lines from OpenReach. Eventually all the telephone exchanges will stop handling phone calls from old landlines. But eventually is a little way off and with over 100 companies like GigaNet installing fibre in the UK there will be a lot of consolidation and new services being offered. One of the very large fibre installers, CityFibre are scheduled to install fibre into Emsworth (or perhaps they will just buy GigaNet) and it’s hard to think OpenReach won’t get to us eventually.