AAISP (A&A) Reviews

AA's telephony and Broadband services are expensive and for the most part value for money. However, there are occasions were they fall short, causing customers extreme frustration and anger. On these occasions it's the junior support staff who are often in the "firing line", however in my experience it's often the senior staff causing the issues. What are the issues? Failure to answer support tickets, failure to return phone calls, failure to meet agreed deadlines, failure to adopt the company policy of honesty and integrity. Of course, AA will frequently respond to criticism of this nature with the one liner; "email our Escalation team" but that, in my opinion its wasted time. After all the Manager of Support Dept also happens to be the Manager of Escalation Dept. Similarly, The Team Leader of Support Dept also happens to be the Team Leader of Escalations Dept. The old addage "The foxes are supervising the hen house" springs to mind.

I chose Andrews and Arnold due to their strong reviews for customer service and technical competence. Before signing up I contacted sales who I was, and continue to be, impressed with. None of the usual hard sell and scripted responses, just simple factual answers from people who understand what I’m asking.
The broadband has been flawless, the only issues I’ve experienced have been when our sparky killed the power - and even then I received notifications to tell me the network was down.
Overall I’m very impressed. The broadband and VoIP services have been flawless, the sales team have been remarkably helpful, and their support team have been awesome too. Speeds are as expected (when using a hard-wired connections - WiFi speeds vary greatly as one would expect)

I've been an A&A customer for 12 years across 3 house moves and a recent upgrade to their FTTP service. They're not the cheapest but I firmly believe that you get what you pay for, and in this case that's an incredibly reliable service with exceptional support available over pretty much every communication medium except carrier pigeon (although I wouldn't be surprised if they're working on adoption of RFC1149).

Of the few incidences of downtime we've experienced over the years, I can't think of one that wasn't either caused by a fault in my own network equipment, a careless OpenReach engineer working on a nearby cabinet, or the one time that lightening hit the telephone pole outside our house and melted the phone socket. In every instance, their support staff were responsive, efficient, and a pleasure to deal with.

After my old ISP decided to pull the plug I opted for Andrews & Arnold to replace them as I needed a fixed IP address and a reliable provider. The old old provider was actually a reseller and so I had a few issues getting things switched over - it looked like I would have to get a new line and this delayed things a while as Openreach are fairly useless. In the end the original line was used and the switchover was faultless. A & A provided the account details in advance so I could configure the modem & router. They also sorted out reverse lookup on the IPV4 and IPV6 addresses.

So far everything has been fine and reliable. It's nice to have native IPV6 rather than relying on a tunnel from Hurricane Electric for IPV6 - though they did delegate the whole of the IPV6/64 reverse zone to me so I could change reverse IPV6 addresses easily. Having said that A & A will update the zone if needed.

Dave

After Zen massively fumbled several things for me and I had my eyes opened to how their customer service had degraded over recent years, it was the final straw to give me the excuse to move to A&A. I was aware of their reputation from social media interactions but I had held off due to pricing and the bandwidth caps they had in place at the time.

Initially after moving, there were some problems. Relatively frequent brief loss of service events. However, all of this was communicated about (problems they were actively fixing with their equipment) and I had an automatic 4G failover anyway, so it barely affected me.

Since then, everything has been rock solid and they've even (at my price tier) removed the bandwidth cap, which I'd not come close to hitting in any case.

What I'm most happy about is they were able to achieve the thing Zen completely failed with: Allowing me to set up a broadband account for my mother that I pay for and she can discuss with A&A if needed.

That's been the situation for over a year now and I've not had "mid-contract price increases in line with RPI" and the service has been exceptional. The monitoring, billing and "admin" control UI have been useful and flawless.

If you're on the fence because of pricing, just don't worry about it. It's worth every penny.

Rock solid service in general, and when I've has physical line issues they've got Openreach out to fix quicker than it would have taken some of the bug names to admit there was a fault.

Andrews and Arnold have great customer support where you can talk to real people who know their technical stuff. The service has worked very well for me and the voip was very easy to set up as I used their step by step guides that were published on their website.

Yes the telephone support is quick to be answered and UK based, however the staff seem less than enthusiastic.

The network latency is poor likely due to their limited peering and a London based IXP presence only.

Great support, great value, static IP and reverse IP

This ISP is great for any self-respecting enthusiast, with all the features you could ever want.

This is *the* ISP for anyone who likes talking to actual real human beings who are knowledgeable and able to help! Possibly the only service like this left in the known universe!

They're also great value for money and technically excellent. I've been with them for nearly a decade now, and I can't imagine going to another ISP ever again, and if you're not a customer I recommend you head over there ASAP.

Their emails aren't formatted as if they spent £££ on artwork and advertising, their UIs are sometimes clunky and like everyone else sometimes things go wrong, but the difference with A&A is that they then pick up the phone, figure out what is wrong within a few minutes and then fix it. Wow! It is like going back in time!

Can't rate them highly enough; they deserve more stars :)