ISP Reviews by Nairda

I have been with IDNet almost continuously since 2008, with just a few brief moves to other ISPs, for various reasons, but I have always ended up back with IDNet. I have had a few technical issues over the years, and every member of the support team I have dealt with has been courteous and helpful.

I am currently having a problem with my phone line in wet weather causing frequent loss of sync and thanks to IDNet's endeavours I have just had a visit from Mr Open-Reach who has confirmed a line fault and is arranging for the entire overhead line, going back several poles, to be replaced.

At every stage of the process IDNet have done exactly what they said they would do and have always made the promised followup phone call, even at a quarter to one in the morning! When help is needed from IDNet support, the phone is always answered very quickly by people who know what they are doing

As is often said, IDNet may be a bit more expensive than the likes of Talktalk and BT but in the end you get what you pay for.

I migrated to A&A about a year ago onto their Home::1 package and was put onto their Talktalk backhaul which gives me a good measure of control over my line. In the year I have been with them I have had a good solid connection with excellent speeds and no significant issue until the early hours of a recent Saturday morning my router started syncing, holding sync for a minute or so,usually long enough for authentication to take place, then dropping sync and starting all over again.

I tried all the usual things at home such as a different router, connecting to the master socket etc. to no avail. Unfortunately, A&A don't provide support out of business hours and while they wouldn't have been able to do much as it turned out to be an exchange fault, it would have been nice to have been able to talk to someone. To their credit support staff are often available on their IRC channel, but with no broadband and all but no mobile phone reception here,there was no way of contacting anyone.

On Monday morning I phoned A&A, the phone was answered within seconds by Alan who ran through the problem with me, went through all the checks I had already done, as he was required to do, and concluded that it was almost certainly an external fault and raised the issue with Talktalk, who arranged for a BT OR engineer to come out on Wednesday.

Due to a detected line fault the first engineer was not a broadband man but he did as much as he could and rectified a line fault. I contacted Alan immediately and he arranged for a broadband engineer to come on Thursday who spent a considerable amount of time on the case and rectified the fault with a lift and shift on Talktalk's kit in the exchange.

Throughout the whole exercise Alan kept me informed of progress and checked how things were going at my end.

The good things here are that I was able to speak the same person at A&A every time I called, the phone was answered quickly every time, and the case was followed through to a successful conclusion.

In the not too distant future I should be able to get FTTC and I have considered migrating to a different ISP, partly for cost reasons but also due to the cap on downloads that A&A impose. However,after this experience I am inclined to pay the higher cost of staying with A&A and hope that they will see fit to increase their Home::1 allowance to 200GB so as to be competitive with people like IDNet and to some extent Zen. The 100GB cap isn't much of an issue for me at the moment but it could easily become so and the extra £10/month to raise the cap would make A&A much more expensive.

So, yes, A&A have lived up to their reputation and have proved to be a first class ISP. It's a bit like insurance, a cheap ISP is OK when things work, but when things go wrong you need people who can and will get things done.

Thank you Alan, and everyone at A&A.

Adrian