ISP Andrews and Arnold Plan CityFibre Based FTTP Broadband
UK ISP Andrews & Arnold (AAISP), which until now has historically only sold fixed broadband and phone services via Openreach’s national network, has today become the latest internet provider to announced that they’ll soon be launching a range of ultrafast and gigabit speed packages via CityFibre’s full fibre network.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the Sahara Desert for the past few years, then you’ll probably already be aware that CityFibre are currently investing £4.9bn to rollout a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across a big chunk of the United Kingdom.
The work has so far enable the operator to cover 1.7 million UK premises – with 1.5m ‘Ready For Service‘ via a supporting ISP (here). The aim is to cover up to 8 million premises – across around 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here). But they also aspire to reach into rural areas via Project Gigabit (here).
As part of that they’ve also managed to attract a lot of support from both major and minor ISPs, such as Zen Internet, Giganet, Vodafone, iDNET and many more. The good news is that one of the market’s most reputable providers, AAISP, has just announced that they’re going to join that list. But there’s still some work to be done first.
Statement from Andrews & Arnold
We are happy to announce that a contract has been signed with CityFibre.
CityFibre is an “Alt-Net”; a fibreoptic carrier independent of OpenReach. They supply gigabit services into homes in many cities and towns throughout the country over their own fibre network infrastructure. Their geographical footprint is gradually increasing on an ongoing basis.
A&A now has to do substantial work to :
➤ physically connect to their network
➤ implement API functionality for placing orders and raising faults
➤ undertake a phase of testing with a small number of employee lines
… before we’ll be ready to offer CityFibre based Internet services to our customers in England. We will also be preparing details of the specific service offerings we will be making available, and their pricing.
The ISP hopes to be in a position to start taking orders for their new CityFibre based broadband packages from “early autumn” this year.
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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Got excited then “… before we’ll be ready to offer CityFibre based Internet services to our customers in England”
I guess no love for Scotland
Hi Peter.
Honestly, it’s not that there’s no love for Scotland! There is plenty!
But the National Access product which we are taking presently only gives us reach in England. We do feel this might change, in time, but cannot promise anything. 100% not a slight; we’d obviously love to be able to deliver services north of the border, and do hope to be able to do so in time.
Cheers-
Alex.
(GM, A&A)
@Alex Blood
Thanks for the reply, CityFibre just seems confusing from a consumers prospective.
Cityfibre is in Scotland, quite a few cities, i think it depends on how the ISPs get their network connected up to the local exchanges
Finally! This will be my backup ISP when they launch it 🙂
Just need Cityfibre to buy up all of the other altnets now…
In the meantime, do A&A have plans to take on other altnets with wholesale services? Gigaclear?
I can’t speak for A&A on this, but I doubt they’d find Gigaclear’s wholesale terms that attractive. Being vertically integrated is another competitive problem with some altnets.
Hi there Sotonian,
It’s absolutely not impossible we’d consider linking up with another AltNet such as Gigaclear.
I should be clear though, and say we’ve no plans to do this right now, but we do monitor the situation (mainly the coverage areas of various AltNets) from time to time, and if we feel at a later date that it may be advantageous for us to join another one, it could happen.
Cheers-
Alex.
(GM A&A)
If anyone maybe Netomnia as they have some growth spurt currently all over the UK
If they’re looking for edge-cases to test their integration with, I’d (unbiased of course) recommend any areas that were originally née FibreNation. We’ve been stuck with TalkTalk as the only option for 2 years, despite promises of “nationwide availability” following CityFibre’s acquisition.
Not sure where you are but the York exclusivity deal with TT / FN has finished now. Voda MS3 and TT are all live.
out of all FTTP providers it looks like CityFibre will be the ones who actually put a strain on VM.
Look forward to their stance this time next year
Pleased about this. I really do think everyone should go with CityFibre over Opeanreach. Their service is so much better; both cheaper and faster. I have been with CityFibre for 6 months and cannot fault them. I wish Sky would follow suit.
CityFibre isn’t without reliability issues though – in some areas they are having issues fairly regularly – it’s not as mature as the Openreach service and general network quality. For all the faults with Openreach generally, the underlying network is pretty good.
Great news, this will help AAISP to stay on top of their game.
Now, if they did a deal with Community Fibre that would be good for me as they’re “coming soon” to my area. I’ll then finally be able to get off this crappy ADSL I’ve been stuck on for the longest time.
Stay. They’ve never been on the ball. Let alone top of the gane
@Philip that’s just not true.
This could be the time I finally switch to AAISP for more than just VoIP.
Although I imagine there will be usage caps, and as CF don’t seem to allow ISPs to offer business services, AAISP may well refuse to issue VAT invoices as they do with Home::1.
I’d trust AA more than anyone else to fix issues as they arrive.
The big question tho, is will this be done via PPPoE (sad) or IPoE/some other protocol (happy!)
Cityfibre hand off as QinQ IPoE so theoretically, there will be no reason for PPPoE to be required other than fitting with existing infrastructure at A&A. Watching the firebrick release notes for mentions of QinQ is probably a good early indicator
Thanks. It seems a lot of ISPs are obsessed with using PPPoE on CF, for no reason other than “we’ve got this kit so we’ll use it”. Open source implementations of PPPoE mostly suck and it has more CPU overhead than is in any way nessecary.
I have already made the decision that my next ISP (when CF arrive) won’t have it.
@Rich
TalkTalk don’t use PPPoE on their Cityfibre (and Openreach) based FTTP services
No monthly limit caps?
lol don’t be silly. Caps. And totally not employees defending those caps on here.
for a moment, I almost forgot it’s 2022.
Most people would never go anywhere near the maximum usage allowances, and currently my monthly allowance stands at 9000G due to roll over. If you are a person that consumes more than 5TB a month then hard luck, its not for you, why are people so bitter about it?
With 1990’s style caps
Their FTTP packages come with 5000GBytes of allowance a month (or 8000 on a business product), anyone using more than that a month isn’t a loss to AAISP or their other customers. Most customers have way more allowance than that each month due to roll-over because they use a lot less and it accumulates. Really the allowance is just a clear and upfront fair usage policy so everyone knows where they stand. Extreme heavy users go elsewhere.
By default fttp plans come with 500Gb (home) I believe you pay extra to upgrade to 5TB.
Not disagreeing that the 5Tb should be plenty, but should that not be the default? Does the actual per megabit incremental usage on a broadband plan cost them over £10 for a maximum exposure of 5TB. If so why, because wholesalers now supply circuits on a unmetered basis as standard, so the worst case is paying for an extra 10G nni (typically free or low cost) plus cross connect. Obviously linx ports and transit are not free but you might be talking about say £80 per gigabit worst case..
imagine having to keep a eye on your data usage in 2022
With 5000 Gigs of data a month which goes up each month as half of the left over is rolled across so it accumulates, quite simply you don’t have to keep an eye on it unless you are a person with very excessive usage, then quite frankly, why should other customers subsidise those people or be slowed down by them? If you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy it.
There is NO way it costs them more, or “disrupts their network” or how is it other ISPs can take the hit without resorting to bullying the customer into a FUP .. but AAIPS can’t??
Tired of their employees writing camouflaged praises of their cap system.
>well don’t shop there then.
Ok. Can you stop defending them too?
I can assure you I’m not an employee. If there was no need for AAISP to have a usage policy they wouldn’t have one. AAISP has given me the most consistent speeds and always full line rate than any other ISP so far.
It seems to me so many people want to join AAISP because of their service and uncongested network but are extreme consumers of data so need unlimited which prohibits them from joining and they seem rather bitter about it. Think of it as a gym membership that you pay more for because they limit total membership numbers and the price keeps out the riff raff 🙂
Or put it another way, some people are happy going to a rather mediocre all you can eat buffet where you may not get what you want, where others go to a nice restaurant. Do you then shout at the restaurants about why they don’t allow you to eat everything for one price?
Different companies cater for different clients.
You had caps on dial up? Seems unlikely.
Formercustomernothappy, bandwidth has always cost money for ISPs? ISPs will throttle downloads during peak usage, if you need throughput guarantees then you have to choose your ISP carefully?
@ T
This is 2022, not 2002. None of the main isps throttle services at peak times.
@Phil
Contrary to popular opinion not everyone lives in Telford and downloads stuff willy nilly just for the sake of it. Some users (eg businesses) have a genuinel need to download huge amounts of data each month yet A&A can’t cater for them. It’s utterly bizarre that in the year 2022 they still have data limits yet other premium ISPs such as Fluidone (who are better than A&A) scrapped them donkeys years ago.
What do Fluidone charge for FTTP 1000/100 unlimited?
Of course AA cater for businesses by offering leased lines that are unlimited.
@Phil
Fluidone charge around £120/m for a unlimited 1000/115 service on Openreach tails. There’s nothing stopping A&A charging the same sort of money for the same service. In other words they can charge a pretty penny for unlimited services without going into leased line pricing territory.
Yes I’m aware that A&A offer leased lines to businesses with unlimited usage but this discussion is about FTTx services on the Openreach platform where 99.99% of ISPs offer unlimited usage except A&A. I’m afraid this blurb “we won’t slow your line down!” is soooo dated from A&A.
It makes sense for ISP’s to use CityFibre, where there’s no overlap with Openreach, with potential FTTP customers choosing an Altnet in those areas, as there’s no other choice for FTTP. Things will get more interesting as overbuild increases nationally.
Around 6 years from now, much of the UK will be overbuilt with Openreach, Virgin Media, and Altnet providers competing for customers, across all areas; Scale counts in Telecoms, and Openreach/BT are planning to increase Net Profits, through cost savings, on the back of the move to cloud, PON, and Exchange closures; BT are currently aiming for £2.5 Billion annual cost savings by the end of 2025.
Once the rollouts are completed, OFCOM will have no choice but to release the shackles on BT, and allow true pricing competition. Clearly the Altnets will struggle to compete with the big players on wholesale, so how will wholesale Altnet providers, like CityFibre, compete under those circumstances? Some will argue symmetrical FTTP will differentiate the Altnets from the likes of Openreach, but how many users actually require symetrical FTTP? Certainly not gamers where latency is more important; Only business users, like small scale Video server providers, etc, might require higher upload bandwidths, providing some sort of service to multiple clients.
I can see why some ISP’s might use Altnets now, but what happens when true competition is allowed?
BT are still having to fill the massive hole in their pension schemes and will be doing it for many year in the future. A problem others don’t have.
I understand the points you make, but as a gamer most gamers stream to twitch or other services now and at a good quality can use up to 10mb of upload and give you latency a good hit if you are even anywhere near the bandwidth limit.
Id much rather have 500/500 than 500/20 or some crap upload from VM or just a bit better from OR
“BT are still having to fill the massive hole in their pension schemes and will be doing it for many year in the future. A problem others don’t have.”
It was only around £1.1bn, at the end of March 2022, using IAS 19 accounting assumptions. Hardly massive for a company the size of BT, and more than covered by the projected savings going forward. I’m not sure why the press push the narrative about BT’s debt and Pension Deficit. BT’s debt is around £18 Billion, and £6 Billion of that is reported as lease liabilities; VMO2 started life with £18 Billion in debt, and plan to spend £10 Billion on Fibre rollout. Clearly BT’s finances are good, and even if the the full £18 Billion was financial debt, instead of £12 Billion with £6 Billion lease liabilities, the valuation of Openreach alone more than covers the debt. Of course BT isn’t just Openreach, it has Consumer (EE), Enterprise, Digital, Global, and UK wide infrastructure assets; Adding everything up, the debt isn’t an issue, and neither is the pension deficit.
I hate botism, I’m married to no company, loyalty never did any good apart from milking cash from me. I tried plenty ISPs over the years from dial up, I only discovered andrew&Arnold from ispreview, now been with these guys nearly a year, looking to get second fibre line, but kelly communications messed me up, told all sorts of lies about I never let them in etc. Got a new date to finish installation, they did the inside but couldn’t adjust the original openreach work, so openreach guy needs to come and finish everything properly… I’m very happy with everything andrew&Arnold does and especially the latency, perfect for real-time gaming, for the average joe just streaming videos, anything is okay.
My only hope is folk will educate themselves and experiment with the different ISP etc. Find something they like and works for them and just get on with it, life is too damn short. We’re all done with botism… my intel is better than your AMD and nvidia vs ATI sony vs Microsoft etc… you get it, I say folk needs to grow up, I was with virgin since 2006, there was no alternative except adsl 8meg, but now openreach upgraded my street, I’m never looking back until maybe putin nuke London and reset everything back to the stone age. I’m really happy with everything andrew&Arnold doing including not altering prices in and out of contract and each year going up. Theres no reason to change finally the unfiltered internet is just perfect for me, I’ll do my own filtering… love the freedom.
Please just find something that works for yourselves and go for it, stop wining.