Broadband ISP Andrews and Arnold UK Finally Adopt Unlimited Data
The day has finally come when UK ISP Andrews & Arnold (AAISP), which have long been one of the few remaining fixed line broadband providers’ to only offer plans with capped data allowances (albeit very big ones), has finally adopted packages that come “without a usage cap” (aka – unlimited, although they don’t describe it like that).
Until now consumers looking to take out one of AAISP’s broadband packages, such as via their FTTP or FTTC products, would have typically chosen one with a default data allowance of either 1TB (TeraByte) or 10TB. For example, their 115Mbps speed home broadband package on Openreach’s network would cost £37 per month for 1TB or £47 for 10TB.
However, the big change today means that those 10TB packages will now be expressed as coming “without a usage cap“, although the ISP will retain their 1TB plans for those who have lower usage demands but still want high quality service and support etc.
Advertisement
For many years A&A has resisted offering “Unlimited” plans. Our explanation for this unusual approach has always been themed in a way that aims to be “technically correct”; one can not download an elephant and one can not download more than the capacity of the connection multiplied by time. Therefore, strictly, “unlimited” is false.
We’ve often resorted to analogy to bolster our explanations; “an all you-can-eat buffet actually does run out eventually”, for example.
In tandem with this, we believe we have always offered usefully and appropriately high inclusive usage limits, such that many customers (in their own words) often describe them as “effectively unlimited for me”. What they mean by this is that the quota so massively exceeds their actual usage, that the limit is not something they must worry about, or indeed think about at all, ever.
This allergy to presenting something not entirely correct has, definitely, had a consequence for A&A in terms of potential customers. We are definitely aware that potential customers have chosen an alternative provider because of quota anxiety.
The business has changed and developed, and real world usage has started to plateau. We have also deployed a large number of our new FireBrick FB9000 as LNSs and BGP routers, and begun offering higher bandwidth services, up to a gigabit, and monitored average usage over a sensible period of time. We are confident we have ample network capacity.
As a result, we feel that now is the time to start to offer packages that other ISPs would probably describe as “unlimited”, but which we would describe as “without a usage cap”.
Changes this month
During August anyone on:
- Home::1 10T
- SoHo::1 20T
- Office::1 20T
will have their package changed, with no increase in cost. Our website and order pages will be updated over the coming days too.
“Lite” Tariff
Anyone on
- Home::1 1TB
- SoHo::1 2TB
will have their package name changed to “Home::1 Lite” or “SoHo::1 Lite”. The price will stay the same, and the inclusive usage will remain unchanged. This package is intended for people who want the high quality, low latency Internet connection A&A provides but do not need high usage, and at the slightly more budget-friendly price point.
Final words
We hope customers are pleased with these changes, though we do recognise that in a majority of cases they will have no effect at all!
We want to reassure everyone that this change has been extremely carefully thought through, and the assurances given over many years about being able to maintain quality of service (in terms of loss and latency) still stand. We are confident that we will still be able to offer low latency, high quality, Internet connections.
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.
« EE and Sky Removing Netflix Basic Plan from UK TV Packages
Damn if I hadn’t re-subscribed to Sky for another two years just today I would consider a&a now that they don’t have a usage cap.
I wonder if re-subs have a cooling off period…
They do have the same 14 day cooling off period
As a home user I would imagine that you are still entitled to the 14 day cool-off as the provider still describes it as a new contract period but IANAL.
On another note, even at 1TB of allowance, I regularly have 2TB allowance (due to roll over) even with using 900 to 1400GB per month.
This change is technically correct and I appreciate that they set themselves apart by doing this.
IANAL but If it means you taking out a new contract then the 14 day cooling off period probably applies.
Call them and say you’ve changed your mind and see what they say 🙂
Fair enough – I’ll be sticking with the A&A ‘Lite’ tariff, since until recently we’d never gone over 300GB in a month (which was the cap, until a couple of years ago). Last month we hit nearly 400GB, but 1TB gives me plenty of headroom (plus you get the tariff bonus of 50% of last month’s leftover, so I actually have about 1.6TB this month).
Besides, as we’re still on copper and living in one of the biggest fibre deserts around, I’m not going to be hitting up some hyperspeed connection any time soon. Once fibre comes, I’ll save £8/month, or I can pay an extra £2/month and go unlimited (on Openreach FTTP if we ever get it).
I’ve been using Talktalk for years as a backup to Virgin. It’s been cheap and cheerful. But perhaps AAISP could be a good option…
Not as a backup – they’re just too good for that! It would be like having a Porsche as a ‘backup’ car 🙂
Depends what you can get really. If I ever needed backup (I’m with A&A, so I don’t!) then I would stick a 5G dongle in the router. But I’m still on copper so I ironically have to pay more for less (FTTP would be £8/month cheaper, if we ever get it)….
“Porsche as a ‘backup’” lol. I was using this extraordinary Internet from AA and didn’t see a difference. The only reason they’ve been keeping those silly limits was their poor Internet Exchange port speed compared to competitors.
I wonder how many home customers were using more than 10TB and therefore stand to benefit from this change?
On the flip side, I know of a number of customers who use more than 1TB but less than 10TB, so used the “quota bonus” feature to periodically switch between 1TB and 10TB as required.
A great example of “you can’t please everyone”.
Wood. Trees.
You’d have to be trying pretty hard, or have a big family with serious 4k streaming habits, to break 10TB. We’re a fairly busy family of 3 (I have a gaming-loving son and a streaming-loving wife) and the most we’ve used in a month is not even 400GB. That’s with up to 5 computers (incl work ones), 3 phones, a gaming device, smart TV, a few Raspberry Pi’s, etc.
The ability to switch to the higher usage tariff for a month with a 50% data carryover was the USP that encouraged me to stay with AAISP for a number of years. However, with access to FTTP, the £20/month difference in cost encouraged me to move to Aquiss. Over the past 2 1/2 years, my FTTP connection with Aquiss has been faultless.
I wish AAISP well with this change but I suspect that for most consumers the unlimited usage offer is still too expensive.
My monthly allowance has been 18TB-ish for a few months, but I’d rather overpay for massive headroom than bump into a cap. Just occasionally I kick off a 300GB download or a similarly sized restore of a cloud backup.
Have been with A&A for nearly a year and despite some of their well documented outages (dangers of rolling your own hardware), the service has been exceptional.
We’ve been with them for nearly 4 years (on cranky old Openreach copper) and I don’t think I’ve had an outage longer than a couple of minutes that I’ve ever noticed (most blips happen overnight during planned work). The last episode of connection ‘flapping’ I experienced appears to have been me, not them. I switched off the router, re-seated all the cables (including the lovely RJ11 phone cable), restarted, and it’s been rock stable since (over a month now).
Can’t wait to experience them over fibre, some time before 2067 hopefully (perhaps my house will be the last in the country to get it)….
I have no problem with the generous caps, and I appreciate AA’s dedication to quality and being technically accurate.
…but this stuff about not using the term “unlimited” because it’s technically impossible is a bit rich when you look at their ethernet services page:
https://www.aa.net.uk/ethernet/
They’re just trying very hard to explain why they’re finally dropping an unscientific and unpopular policy on bandwidth caps.
Their customers usage habits will not change, and the only surge in data consumption will come from acquiring more customers who will now consider them since the can now advertise an equivalent product with the rest (although at a slightly higher price).
I’ll be honest, I used to be put off by both the pricing and the data caps, they’ve dropped the data cap, it remains only to convince myself to give them a try even at the higher prices
So really nothing has changed if you were on 1TB service you still have 1TB. That’s a bit unfair – I would say if there is no cap then don’t charge overage in that case.
It really should have been other way around a discount offered for those who are light users or just if you go over 1Tb but less then 10 you still get internet.
The best just got better. Respect.
I doubt very much the vast majority of people were ever using 10TB as simply having a limit kept anyone that would get close to that amount from signing up. This now potentially opens the flood gates to new customers who abuse the network, but given cheaper unlimited options elsewhere, I suspect it will not make much difference. The customers that would have benefited, such as those on the 1TB allowance (which is still expensive), do not see anything given to them. So this is just a PR stunt rather than actually giving anything extra to their existing customers.
At least they’ve stopped using their customers as unpaid BETA testers by constantly messing with firmware, but still haven’t been able to fix their new Firebricks and are unable to update the firmware without instability being reintroduced, despite this they have replaced all the older but stable Firebricks with the new 9000s, which seems extremely risky, but that’s how they run it seems.
When we joined, the basic cap was 300GB, and it’s now 1TB for ‘free’. No price increase since 2020, so I really can’t complain. 10TB was massive anyway, and you’d have to be trying hard to hit that, but I suppose some might manage it.
On the stability issue, they’ve been very open and honest about it all, and it makes interesting reading for techies. In practical terms, they’ve been incredibly reliable and I can’t even recall when I last had an issue (other than one caused at my end), and that’s on cranky old Openreach copper.
@Alastair Stevens I had a few dropped work video calls or pages not loading when their kit was crashing, it was only affecting people on higher speeds that A&A used extensively to BETA test with. It was only the constant bad publicity in another forum that made them give up randomly trying fixes and they moved back to the last stable firmware they had managed to produce, and I don’t think they know even now why that works and anything else since crashes. There were many overnight drops as well. Just not the service expected when you are paying their prices. My new ISP I’m well over 100 days of uninterrupted up-time, which I never achieved at A&A, they are also cheaper and unlimited. I suspect going “unlimited” is because they’ve bled customers recently who just got fed up paying a premium to just be unpaid testers for hardware they sell elsewhere.
The fb9000 is a strange product to have made and by all accounts has been a total failure, as far as I know AA are the only ones who use them even now so they are not even selling them elsewhere (successfully). A product that can do 1Mpps (a few Gbps) selling for 7500, configurable by xml only. It’s dead and I think sadly the days of AA and firebrick providing actual value are over these days with full fibre
I expect you are correct about the vast majority of people were ever using 10TB, the problem is how do most people know what they are using? Most routers will not hold a record and most providers don’t as well.
I looked at A&A once, and the limit put me off and so did the price, I doubt I would ever go anywhere near 10TB, certainly not with FTTC as I was on then, but I did not want to take that chance.
I have found a ISP I am happy with now and unless something goes wrong, or I move, I have no plans on changing.
A&A, FTTP Internet with download speed up to 115Mb/s and upload up to 20Mb/s, £37 a month for 1TB quota. I pay £2 less for 500Mb/s up and down, unlimited.
I realise that A&A is for a different market and their customer service is fantastic, and some people may find that useful, certainly if they run a business or use their broadband for that sort of thing.
But for most home users, it is expensive.
I have recommended them to some people, due to the service, but most look at the price and limits.
Hardly get over 10TB in a single month. My average usage per month for two of us in a household never go over 375GB. If FTTP come, I will switch to AAISP.
I enquired only yesterday if they had an uncapped/unmetered plan, and they very firmly said no. My interaction with Zen’s AI bot was far more useful.
Do Zen have uk based & decent technical support? I’d like to move away from sky. A&a looked good but at more than double the monthly cost I’m hesitating. Zen maybe a good option?
Enjoy Zen’s flip-flopping between their London and Manchester gateways 🙂
Their stance maybe made some sense when ISPs like Virgin sold ‘unlimited’ packages, but then had traffic shaping once you hit a ceiling. But (to my knowledge) nobody has done that for a very long time.
The wording on their statement is very pedantic. Nobody really thought that they could download more than their connection’s bandwidth would allow during a month. “Unlimited” is not the same as “infinite”. It was taken to read that the ISP didn’t artificially limit the connection.
There are other battles to fight – like what ‘fibre’ actually means, although that one appears to be lost.
“There are other battles to fight – like what ‘fibre’ actually means, although that one appears to be lost.”
It was lost because the ASA didn’t do its job.
@GNewton / JNeuhoff
Long time no hear! How you keeping mate? Really missed your valuable input.
I agree it’s much more honest to sell a unlimited connection than to sell a 10TB data allowance on a 20Mb circuit for example.
It made some sense when the competition were throttling, a usage allowance is at least deterministic and was clearly preferred by some. However this change is about 6 or so years late
lol maybe we’ll get lucky and they might bother to encrypt their L2TP one day too