ISP Andrews and Arnold Trial Faster UK FTTP Broadband Speeds
UK ISP Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) has announced that they’re preparing to bring the latest model of their core Firebrick routers into service (FireBrick FB9000), which include better hardware and as a result they’ll be able to trial faster broadband speeds on their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based packages.
The provider is somewhat of a rarity in this market because they design and manufacture their own range of routers (FireBrick®). “These are designed from the ground up by our team – the PCB layout, the casework, the operating system and software are all in our control and are designed and made here in the UK,” said the provider.
However, such hardware does – from time to time – still need to be upgraded in order to keep pace with the times, which became an issue with their previous FB6000 (e.g. it only had two 1Gbps ports). By comparison, the new FB9000 adds 2 x 10Gbps ports, 8 x 1Gbps ports, dual power inlet and claims low power consumption (full specs not yet available).
The extra capability means that AAISP are now able to prepare a trial of faster connections, which will offer existing FTTP customers the option to upgrade their service to faster speeds (i.e. 330Mbps, 550Mbps and 1000Mbps – max profile rate). The trial itself is expected to launch during mid-March 2022 and, by the sounds of it, they’ll continue this until sometime in April, before the new speeds become more generally available.
At this stage there are no public details on how much the new tiers will cost.
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 and Linkedin.
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Great to see hardware innovation and manufacturing taking place in the UK, would love to see a presentation from AAISP in the future at a NetLDN/NetMCR detailing how the hardware was developed.
Im with AAISP and when FTTP finally comes to my area im glad i will be able to stay with them. I was dreading having to move. And yes they ar3 worth the money and you get what you pay for
But question are they going to be UNLIMITED Data?
I will guess not, because by setting restrictions, regardless of how high, it keeps the “must use connection 24/7 at max speed” brigade away, which is good for A&A.
If the ~160GB/day on Home::1 5TB package is insufficient, their leased lines do not have data caps, but obviously with the accompanying leased line pricing!
nope. and that’s what puts me off them. caps, in 2022.
maybe they don’t want to aim themselves towards regular home users? or maybe they don’t want unlimited users .. heck knows .. but I’d go with them today because they are a good ISP and their customer service is excellent , but i don’t want my broadband capping.
That’s kind-of the point though.
You are paying to be in a club where they *don’t* have users who download 10TB per month – because those are the ones who degrade the service for everyone else.
This in turn means there’s lots of peak capacity around when *you* need it.
That only applies to the AAISP core and transit though – not your local GPON splitter.
@NE555 that isn’t really a point though, following Ofcom rules the advertised speed is the actual average at peak times so if you pay for 500mbps you should get about 500mbps all of the time.
Better support is a fair point, I personally wouldn’t spend A&A prices though some people are happy to, that’s fine its their choice.
OFCOM rules say nothing about having to allow the user to maintain that speed as long as they want on a data restricted package.
Providers are still allowed to have usage limits if they want to.
@DJI I am with AAISP and currently have 9TB in my quota, generally every month.
They give you 5TB a month – who on earth needs that??? If you do, then please stay away from AAISP and leave some bandwidth for the rest of us.
What I would like to see from A&A is a router with VoIP port (rated at least REN 4 for attached devices) and battery backup for power secure voice line replacement, and SIM slot for further backup with 4g/5g Maybe even combined with contact breakouts and autodial features for alarm systems and care pendants. Competing with units like Doro careIP 9300, but also for small locations occupied by businesses.
I think that is pretty niche given the target audience. They’d sooner have a SIP phone and would already have a UPS covering that and much more.
They do support 4G backup (on the units for an end site, not on the ones for the ISP itself), just need the appropriate dongle I believe, rather than building in a modem which limits options and increases costs significantly.
And having recently read the manual for the equipment they make, they have a PABX built into the devices so I think the leaning to SIP is not going anywhere (and rightly so IMO)
> they have a PABX built into the devices
Yes, and it works well. I’ve used it in place of asterisk for a few years now, using a combination of A&A and non-A&A SIP trunking.
Sounds like a lot of dev cost for features that <10% of their base will ever use.
A reminder 125us that the Firebrick doesn’t follow the usual commercial models 🙂
£45pm for the 160/30 FTTP service limited to 500Gb/pm?! Hate to think how much the higher tiers are going to cost.
Seems a bit steep for me considering an equivalent unlimited service can be taken for £31 (EE – cheaper with cashback).
Based on what I have read and just looking at their website, it seems they are stuck somewhat in the past!
What am I missing?
Extra £10 per month gets you 5000GB per month. As a 4G user where contracts are ‘Unlimited’ but with hidden FUP’s sometimes as low as 600gb I prefer the ISP who is upfront with their limits.
> What am I missing?
Potentially nothing – it depends on what you value. I happily pay A&A for connectivity and have done for >10 years now, and also buy their FireBricks. I value:
– plenty of IPv4 space
– IPv6 (which is, thankfully, becoming increasingly common)
– no issue running all manner of servers
– no CGNAT (which helps with the point above)
– great support, when I need it. When we had VDSL with them, we had some Openreach line problems, and their tenacity at getting them sorted was worth every penny. With fibre, I’ve only needed support a couple of times, but the premium for not having to wait in a queue, and being able to speak immediately, or talk on IRC, to someone clued up, is worth the money for me.
– the FireBrick is excellent and, again, support is first class. They spotted a crash before I did, and emailed me to let me know.
The cap hasn’t been an issue, even though we’ve run our business from home for years now, and we’ve always had plenty of headroom to spare, so it is as good as something “unlimited” for our usage. If we were downloading massive games every day, or running multiple video streams constantly, perhaps not.
But I don’t think this means you are missing anything, just that they are not selling the service that you want to buy?
For the extra you get almost instantaneous customer service from someone who is not just reading from a script.
The caps also roll over indefinitely if not used
@John H – “Extra £10 per month gets you 5000GB per month.”
No, the extra £10 gets me the 160/30 service (up from 80/20) – the website is a bit too convoluted to understand easily, not especially user friendly. Checking again, it would be £55 for 160/30 with 5Tb usage.
Its £10 a month for the higher speed and £10 a month for 500gb to 5000gb upgrade. As you quoted the £45 for the 160/80 then £55 will get the download upgrade too.
So that would be a Yes then.
You have a choice and yours is don’t use them but other also have a choice and prefer their offering which is clear and not hidden.
Glad to read this as my favourite ISP was starting to fall behind and I want them to stay in business.
I expect AAISP will up the data limit from 5GB / month too as at 900Mbps, one could hit that in just a few hours.
Those Firebricks are an amazing piece of kit and are what enable the constant quality graphs for AAISP and the end user. Really impressed with them.
“Those Firebricks are an amazing piece of kit and are what enable the constant quality graphs for AAISP and the end user. Really impressed with them.”
It’s the FB6000 range sitting at A&A’s end of the link that enables the CQM graphs. No need to buy your own Firebrick to take advantage of the CQM graphs.
Any router that responds to PPP LCP echos can be used but they can also change it to ICMP pings.
Good, so soon I can upgrade my package to faster speeds with another tenner on top. Hope both down and UP is boosted. And the 5tb a bit higher say 9tb would be great.
I’m glad they dont count the uploads, I’m doing plenty of that essentially for free. Just download is counted in the 5tb monthly limit.
My most important thing is latency, I hope the faster hardware don’t add any milliseconds in latency. From my experience I find energy efficient switches are bit lagging, I think it’s the green, energy efficient thing… I don’t care about energy just speeds and specially latency. I don’t want the thing falling asleep and taking forever to wake up when it’s called.
> My most important thing is latency, I hope the faster hardware don’t add any milliseconds in latency
Currently beta testing the new LNS’s (you can too by pre-pending beta- to your login, just remove it to switch back, everything else stays the same, you’ll know you’re using them if your packets go through *.witless) and in unscientific testing I’d say the latencies are the same or perhaps even slightly improved by a ms or so.
No, a Leased Line Fibre Ethernet connection is not the same as the FTTP service, they’re not “swappable” in that sense.
With Fibre Ethernet the fibre you’re using is dedicated to you, with FTTP you’re sharing a strand of fibre with potentially 64 or more (I believe Openreach do more like 32 max). So it isn’t comparable.
If your boss wants reliable internet, a service level, guaranteed no congestion (unless whoever you’re using is terrible), you want to have the Fibre Ethernet.
Great news, glad to see AAISP are catching up in that sense.
Sadly for me it’s too late. A local altnet ISP is expecting to be able to go live here within the next two months, at which point I’ll no longer be using Openreach FTTP and instead using an alternative (local) network offering symmetrical FTTP speed.
However, if that doesn’t work out for some reason then I’ll keep AAISP in mind! They’ve always been a superb ISP.
900/100 GPON on Zen for £59.99 monthly, free /29 IPv4 block and free /48 native IPv6. I don’t use their router offering (Fritz!Box) but rather an virtualised SDN router & firewall. No usage caps. I don’t know why you’d pay such high price for a well below par AAISP circuit.
Always wondered, who is Andrews and who is Arnold. Just random names for the name of the ISP? Unless I’ve missed it, nobody by those names were involved in the founding of the business.
AA always remind me of Demon Internet it’s tragic what Thus then Cable & Wireless did to that venerable ISP from the early years of the World Wide Web.
I have been with AA since my favorite ISP (Be Unlimited) got swolowed by $ky
and never looked back.
As @Neil mentioned you get
– IPv4 and I have /27 block from them
– IPv6 you get /48 block (but can assign in CP smaller blocks)
– L2TP access as soon as you sign-up
– It’s a UK business emplyoing people in the UK.
Need a reverse DNS (rDNS) as a PTR-record for one or more IPs/domains?
No problem.
I have all sorts of servers running at home (RaspberryPi moustly,
but Mail/TV servers running on Micro Chasis PC’s.
The “UPLOAD” is not metered and on VDSL2 can only be 20Mbps max ..
but sufficient to streming few FHD channels from your TVH server when you out.
No waiting times, instant support over number of channels and you get to speak to real people
I understand and who know what they are talking about!
No one mentioned the CP “Control Panel” where you can tweak your “Line Settings” on xDSL line
https://support.aa.net.uk/Other_Line_Options
Well have a look at the support pages https://support.aa.net.uk/AAISP
decent knowladge base.
xDSL Line Graphs and monitoring …. for £45/month 80/20 VDSL2 with Home::1 500GB package
Instead of paying extra for data I have another line with VDSL2 80/20 package for unlimited
streming, IPTV, etc. from another ISP for £15/month 😉
Yes, their website is bit confusing and I was hesitant to joint over the “download” limits,
but only once run out of data and then decided to get second “cheap” broadband
instead of paying extra £10 for 5TB package.
Local ALT ISP is digging roads around here for 1Gbps symetric service, so I take their offer
when my unlilmited ISP’s offer expires and decide if the AA Home::1 500GB package is worth keeping,
but I thing I already know the answer……