I swapped to A&A last February. My previous provider was Zen, who were excellent. I jumped because lightning zapped my Draytek and FTTC with a free router was cheaper to install than adding another to my pile of fried routers. At the time I believed that Zen would not consider supplying FTTC in locations where BT's availability checker indicated less than 12Mbit/sec. After I'd reached a point of no return in the swap Zen did tell me that long slow lines were OK really.

My old Zen line maxed out at 512Kbits/sec download and sometimes spent days losing sync every four minutes. We'd more or less reached the end of the road in persuading local BT management to do anything to fix things. I live in an isolated old farm 2Km from the cabinet and another 5Km to the exchange, so you can appreciate a degree of Openreach reluctance when it comes to spending money on it.

I have just come out the end of a service episode with a big smile on my face. After politely enquiring by email for a trick to encourage the FTTC to retrain at a higher speed A&A were onto it like a staffie terrier. In spite of my initial apathy surrounding any attempt to get Openreach to look at mere speed problems, they booked a customer visit from Openreach who found and replaced a noisy section of copper about a Kilometer away. I don't know how A&A do it, but a good Openreach tech with the right equipment is a minor miracle in itself. It is still slow, but twice as fast as yesterday.

Good as Zen were, I was pleasantly surprised by A&A right from the start. Everything is so open and direct.

Their control pages are awesome, they sniff line quality all the time and show the results. They gave me a /29 block of IP4. Their IP6 support is top. Mail and phone support is only 9 to 5 with the basic fees, but IRC holds some pleasant surprises if you can handle the level of geek wit from the other customers. They use uk.net.providers.aaisp to keep you informed of general problems.

You pay for every bit you download. Weekday 0900-1800 is priced to discourage wholesale leeching, but every other time is fine. The pricing sums up everything about A&A. There is no sleight of hand. No caps, no weaselly block of usenet in the daytime, no sneaky throttling. They show planned engineering work on their site. They admit their own mistakes. They have a robust attitude to government spying.

It is hard not to like 'em.