Andrews & Arnold Boost Broadband Allowances and Cut FTTP Price
UK ISP Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) has informed all customers of their broadband service that, from 1st August 2021, they intend to significantly boost their monthly data allowances at no additional cost. On top of that, the extra cost for adding an Openreach based Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) line to your package will fall from £15 to £10 per month.
Until now residential customers who took out one of AAISP’s “Home::1” broadband packages (via ADSL2+, FTTC, G.fast or FTTP) would, by default, have been supplied with a 300GB (GigaByte) usage allowance, but this will now become 500GB.
Subscribers could previously upgrade this to 2000GB (2 TeraBytes, if you prefer) for an extra £10 per month, but that too is also being boosted so that you’ll now get 5TB for the same money. Obviously, in a world of “unlimited” allowances, AAISP does look somewhat out of place in its approach. But the majority of consumers often use significantly less than 500GB per month (Ofcom put the average for last year at 349GB).
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Oh this is good. I’m stuck on crappy old ADSL and have just gone back to AAISP as they’re that good. I took out the 2TB option as I regularly go over 300GB (600GB is not unusual) which I can’t max out at my speed, so is effectively unlimited. This will give me even further headroom and if fibre ever magically does become available to me, 5TB sounds quite generous and I’ll bet it will be even higher by then. One day they might even be able to offer unlimited, like the other ISPs.
I wonder if they’ll ever offer anything above 160/30 on FTTP? They’re getting left behind when nearly every ISP who sells Openreach FTTP offers at least the 330/50 speed tier.
Currently on 4G as ADSL was so bad, FTTP is due next year but AAISP were off list due to low cap, now back on it.
@Corporal Punishment FTTP at 160/30 is indeed ridiculous, so I would have to jump ship again if I were in a position to have FTTP.
They’ve also been topping up people’s quotas for free over the pandemic.
It may not be unlimited, but being AA it’s exactly what it says on the tin – not subject to fair usage, throttling at busy times etc. No “prices automatically go up by x%” every year, or jumps when an introductory offer is up either
Name me a fixed line ISP that does have a fair usage policy (or even throttling at busy times).
You’re praising then for not suffering issues that haven’t been much of an issue for nearly a decade.
Even the most budget of ISP’s don’t throttle and give you full bandwidth 24/7.
AA have better support, lower contention (often giving better latency) and are very configurable with a lot of flexibility in their ability to hand out IPV4 by the bucket load.
Here you go John. Brawband (aka Highnet) have a piddly 1TB monthly FUP/AUP on their Cityfibre based FTTP services:
https://www.brawband.co.uk/term/acceptable-usage/
“If a customer is transferring extremely large quantities of data (in excess of 1TB per month) on a regular basis we will, wherever possible, make adjustments to the network to prevent this from impacting other users. If such adjustments are not technically possible BrawBand reserves the right to limit the customer’s bandwidth or to move them to a more suitable and uncontended service which may have a higher cost.”
Yeah great. Quote a random unheard of ISP.
Think talktalk, plusnet, Vodafone. Stupidly cheap providers. They don’t throttle.
My reply was to “Name me a fixed line ISP that does have a fair usage policy”, which I’m pretty sure was implying name ANY ISP, well known or not. FYI Brawband is the ONLY ISP in Inverness to supply Gigabit broadband over Cityfibre FTTP, so no doubt that 1TB monthly limit will make some potential customers run a mile.
Just checked our usage 453.523 GB used in June.
Idnet are just as good
Can’t quite wrap my head around why people would choose an ISP with a cap when nearly all the others out there do not operate like this.
Because they don’t use much data or come lose to their allowance quotas, they get decent support (never used them so can’t say but I only ever see people praising them). And from what I see their prices don’t magically change nor do intense price increases occur.
I find their support rather over-rated. Their staff are generally quite brief, often to the point of being curt. Certain aspects of their service seem deliberately restricted e.g. the ability to receive SMSes on most mobile numbers.
In the days of being on the end of a very long copper ADSL line it was worth paying extra for the support. Being able to speak to someone when my line had decided to go from 1mbit to 0.5mbit was well worth it.
But since getting a solid 80/20 FTTC and soon FTTP I really don’t see the point. All the isps seem the same. I was with zen and switched to Sky and in all honesty absolutely zero difference in speed and reliability. Only really difference is I’m paying half the amount.
@Jono, Unlike Zen, Sky do secretive deep packet inspection and block so-called pirate sites at the behest of Big Media, which you have no control over. You are forced to use a VPN to get round the block.
Are you happy with that? I wouldn’t be and hence boycott the bigger ISPs for this alone.
AAISP, Zen and Aquiss all give you a pure, unfettered internet connection free from any spying or blocking. There might be other smaller ISPs who also do this, but I’m not aware of them.
“There might be other smaller ISPs who also do this, but I’m not aware of them.”
Every single small ISP in the country…
Only the largest ISP’s are required to enforce the high court block lists.
At the time of the 1st high court blocking orders that was Isis with over a set number of customers. It only affected the 6 largest ISP’s.
The high court decided that smaller providers couldn’t afford to invest in the systems required to implement blocking.
That still stands.
There’s absolutely nothing unique about AAISP not blocking/filtering websites.
**ISP’s with a set number of customers
Still need an edit button on this site…
@RaptorX I can see this being a reason for some people and probably me a few years ago but nowadays I pay for everything eg sport, movies music etc so they can inspect my packets as much as they like. I have nothing to hide.
@Jono from a practical perspective it might not make a difference to you, but saying that you have nothing to hide so that it doesn’t matter is a fallacy. They’re spying on you and all their other customers, which is inherently wrong. Can’t really go into a whole conversation about that here, unfortunately.
> are not for everyone – and no the price is the same for everyone – so clearly they attract
> people for a reason.
Indeed.
I’ve used two ISPs in the last ~25 years. Demon & AAISP (for the last ~18 years).
When looking to switch from dial up to ADSL I was looking around at the options. AAISP stuck out for a number of reasons
– Small technical ISP with their ‘No Bullsh1t’ support. IIRC when I was first looking I posted a message to their NNTP newsgroup and got a reply from their director (RevK).
– Various Kernel developers used them (Alan Cox, Dave Jones, David Woodhouse…)
– They themselves used Linux internally (even on core routers IIRC, but now use their own Firebrick stuff).
– No port blocking, filtering, forced proxies etc. Just a straight forward internet connection. As they say, their only job is to shift packets.
– The fact they actively discourage _heavy_ users.
– Their control pages and Continuous Quality Monitoring graphs.
– IPv6
– Block of routable IPv4
– Aiming to never be the bottleneck.
Well I won’t be staying with them once my contract ends. Their stuff are blunt, curt almost to the point of rudeness on the phone. For the same monthly subscription or less on fttp I can get faster speeds with idnet, Zen, Freola to name but a few.I currently am on 160/30 and pay £10 extra because they kept charging for going just over the 300GB cap, very easy when streaming in 4k via Netflix etc..I personally don’t find them to be very residental customer centric, they are more aimed at business the customer in my opinion. They really need to get up to speed literally, 160/30 GB by today’s standards is slow.
> I personally don’t find them to be very residental customer centric, they are more aimed at business the customer in my opinion.
Correct. That has always been the case I think.
> 160/30 GB by today’s standards is slow.
Slow for what though? Even 80/20 (which is is plenty _fast_ enough generally) should handle three 4K (25mbit/sec) streams simultaneously with room to spare.
I had VDSL on one of my lines, as soon as FTTP was available I switched, still on 80/20. It’s _not_ the speed I was after, just a better _quality_ of internet connection.
At some point the speed really does become irrelevant for most people and after that it’s just a pissing contest.
That aside, AIUI, the reason they don’t offer more than 160/30 on FTTP, 160/50 on G.FAST (yet) is because they never want to be the bottleneck, so once they have their new FB9000’s installed and fatter links to BT, then they can safely offer the higher speeds.