AAISP

Having been with AAISP for nearly three years now, there is no doubt they are an excellent ISP. Sadly I have now left due to my usage starting to get higher and higher but if you can afford it for your level of usage and want a reliable service it is definitely worth it. I had a a fault with my line a few months ago and it was fixed very quickly and efficiently. When you email support you get a response from someone who knows what they are doing and it's quick. They are even really helpful when you are leaving! You get what you pay for and I would highly recommend.

I picked AA ISP because of great reviews about the service provided.

They certainly aren't the cheapest and in an all-you-can-eat world, it seemed a step backwards to move to a peak usage pricing model. However, Internet access is so important that you want to know that someone will be there to fix it if it goes wrong.

For 6 months nothing went wrong: was it worth a little extra? The updates are well-composed and the CQM interface impressive. I was able to diagnose congestion we were generating on our network. Certainly more impressive than other providers.

But when a fault developed they showed how good they are. It was a BT fault. A quick chat over the phone to someone who would be third level support at any other ISP, a few tests and the fault was identified as BT fault. BT poked and problem fixed hours later when they replaced hardware at the exchange.

I can't help feeling that would have been a frustrating 7-day battle with one of the big name ISPs, and a great reason for using a company that believes in high levels of service and paying a little bit more for that.

I was with A&A up until 2009 when I moved away to Ireland...they were sorely missed. Unless you live in Dublin, Galway or Cork, Ireland's fixed line ADSL in rural areas (and a sizable percentage of the population live rurally) reminds me of the UK ADSL situation ten years ago. Eircom are the dominant provider and given their current financial state there's not much investment going on outside of very high density population areas.

I moved back to Scotland in January and immediately ordered A&A's Home::1 service. When the service went live my BRAS profile seemed to be stuck at 2MB despite the router syncing at ~8Mb/s. Given that I'm about 300 yards from the exchange this seemed a bit iffy and I expected a bit more than that (it's a 20CN Market 1 exchange so 8MB is the best to be expected). I emailed support and within three hours they had the issue resolved with BT...well done folks.

The level of transparency with regards to fault progress is also something other ISP's could learn from. It's quite nice to be able to watch A&A's interactions with BT in your online account.

Many of my friends don't understand why I pay £35/month (I have the 150GB high user add-on) for broadband - however *I* know exactly why I keep using A&A. I know stuff will get fixed and I know the service will be consistently fast and reliable 24x7.

At the end of the day you get what you pay for, ADSL is important for me (I do a lot of work from home) and I just can't risk crappy customer service, drawn out break-fix times, congestion and incompetence from the "unlimited" tenner a month suppliers.

If you want ADSL done properly then there is no other reasonable choice of provider.

I have not had a bad experience with AAISP in the 3 years I've used them as my home ADSL provider. The line is always stable, they've been very helpful during the ordering process and they know what they're doing. If only other companies (not just in this sector) were as good to deal with.

We're an IT company up in Newcastle, but far enough out in the sticks that internet access is an issue. We used to enjoy 5Mpbs connections through Demon, then moved to a bonded system through a local ISP called Wildcard which gave us 7Mbps.

Then a numpty crashed into the BT cabinet at the end of the street, and our speeds died along with it. The Maximum we could get was 3Mbps and the bonded line kept dropping.

We discussed EFM as an option, but decided to switch to a 4 line 21CN system from AAISP, expecting 4x 3Mb so about 12Mbps. I thought in for a penny in for a pound, so ordered 4 brand spanking new phone lines too!

That bit was worth every penny.. While the Engineer was installing them I took my little ADSL2 tester up and found 1 line syncing at 6Mpbs, but the others down at 3Mpbs so I asked the engineer to investigate.

Turns out there's more than 1 cable between the cabinet & the exchange, and the cable all my other lines on had been joined.

The BT engineer politely moved all 4 lines onto the faster cable - so I owe him big thanks!

Anyway - after the lines have settled I now get 24Mbps!

The only problem is I can now see us chewing through our bandwidth allowance quicker :(

Now, had the original ISP been a bit more proactive with the speed issue we would probably have stayed - but despite having multiple BT engineers telling us the line was fine we knew we'd had better performance before.

In summary : AAISP - fast connection, good communication, not cheap but value for money.