Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) Reviews

I came to AAISP after battling for months with my previous provider (Firefly Internet, formerly Titan ADSL) who were not convinced my line was faulty and refused to pay an Openreach engineer to investigate.

Within 1 week of being with Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) they sent an engineer who almost immediately discovered a damaged cable in the street and fixed it, instantly increasing my download speed by 6x, From ~300kb/s to ~1.7MB/s (around 17mbps), which is the fastest my local exchange can provide.

The transition from my old ISP and phone line was hassle-free, I received new login details for my router shortly before my old service was cut off so there was no downtime for me at all.

They also made some other alterations to my line remotely (not sure what) which reduced my ping by about a half (great for online gaming) and increased my upload speed slightly. My line now has 100% uptime too, whereas my previous ISP would drop out 10+ times a day.

So the problem plaguing me for 3 months with my previous ISP, after endless back-and-forth copy-and-paste stock-response support ticket 6u1l5h!t, was completely fixed within 6 days by AAISP after mentioning it ONCE to them when I signed up, with no fuss, like it was nothing. Amazing.

I also had my BT phone line cancelled (since I never used it) and rent my data-only line with AAISP now too to save a bit of money.

Which brings me to the only vaguely negative point: AAISP are not cheap. If you decide to also rent your phone line with them, though, you can make up a bit of the difference. I'm currently paying about £10 more per month in total than I was with my previous (crap) ISP for their service plus BT line rental, but it's 100% worth it.

Another great thing about AAISP is the very detailed and verbose control panel for your account. You can see a graph of your bandwidth usage showing up/down activity, latency, and all sorts of other technical info about the status of your line. You can also see all the individual support requests involved in setting up your line or dealing with issues (of which I have had none, I hasten to add), when they were created, who last updated them, who is going to respond to them and their expected ETAs. So if you're eager for your line to be set up you can log in and see exactly where they're up to. Basically it's impossible for them to ever 'fob you off'. This is 100% customer support transparency and a shining example of how all ISPs should be run!

I did have reason to contact AAISP via phone during my setup process (a mistake on my part involving the cancellation of my BT line) and someone answered within 2 rings, no menus, just straight through to someone with actual technical knowledge. Again, amazing!

I've been a customer of AAISP for a long time now (14 years? Something like that). I migrated to the AAISP FTTC offering having previously been on the end of a rural broadband connection. Some of my "grandfathered in" perks have also been carried over to the Home::1 package, which I am grateful to AAISP for doing.

Ordering was a breeze, with very simple to answer questions until the order was complete. A date was immediately agreed as go-live (and this was literally hours after the cabinet was given the "Awaiting Orders" status by BT Wholesale).
The FTTC service was actually in and active 1 day earlier than promised, for reasons best known to BT, but fortunately I was able to complete the work necessary to make the swap-over complete at my end of things at short notice.
Once the service was correctly wired in, the modem logged in and everything sprang into life and just worked, first time. Despite the high standards I hold AAISP to, this actually came as no suprise - their stuff generally just works as advertised.

I've done a couple of speed tests, and I have absolutely no complaints with the download speed I am receiving. The download speed I actually achieve is absolutely in line with the vDSL sync speed - Andrews and Arnold are living up to their "we promise not to be the bottleneck" promise - even for a brand new 80Mbit/S line. Download speeds don't drop in the evenings.

10/10 across the board. I continue to have no complaints (even after 14 years) about the AAISP service. I cannot recommend AAISP highly enough, they go the extra mile to make things work first time, and reliably thereafter.

It's a shame that the Speed rating doesn't go up to 11 on this review form; if there was ever any ISP worthy of an 11, AAISP is that ISP.

tl;dr: AAISP are good. Really good. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend another ISP whilst AAISP are here doing their thing.

We moved from a well known internet provider due to the delays to obtain technical help. A&A always pick up the phone and look into issues quickly, giving you a call back to let you know what they have done.

In terms of reliability, we still have issues, but every time I have contacted them, they have done something to attend my request for help and improve the situation when possible.

The only negative I can find, compared to my previous provider, is that the download speed suffers to a point where it is unusable, if I am trying to upload data, to complete back ups to the cloud. I have been told, this is to do with the line capabilities, which I totally understand, but had not experienced previously, i.e. I could upload to Dropbox, while being able to surf the net for content, but this is no longer possible, I need to choose one or the other.

Overall I do recommend them, as I am completely reassured I will find someone very competent at the end of the technical help line, should I need any support.

I moved to A&A from my previous ISP after experiencing very poor customer support.
I ordered a new copper pair dedicated solely to broadband.

The quality of technical support should be near the top of ones ISP criteria.

There are many systems at work delivering a broadband service. Most of them are completely out of your control. So when things go wrong getting help from people that actually know something, as opposed to parroting some inane script, is absolutely vital if you wish to preserve your sanity.

So far I haven't actually needed help from A&A. The installation went without a hitch. From the logs on the A&A website, and the copious technical guides and details, I have confidence that should I ever need help, it will be there.

Noticed recently that my exchange was accepting orders for FTTC (Radyr, CARDIFF ) after quite a long wait. Had been with BT since 2012 reasonably benignly using ADSL2+ with a good line speed of 17Mb/s ( only about 300m from exch) . Had experienced some rudeness and inefficiency at the start using the overseas call-centres although overall never experienced any problem with the service itself.
Reading some of the reviews on this site were quite a eye opener in regards to BT and others though. I had never heard of A&A until they were mentioned on the Zen forums, I had seen Zen mentioned in 'Which' magazine also John Lewis Broadband which is a front for Plusnet - more expensively !
Enough of the ramble, A&A score because of the short 6mth contract, no requirement to take the line as well,in fact they don't offer any voice services here so you can't. Signed up online for 80/20 FTTC and a date a fortnight hence was arranged for the changeover which occurred on 1st September . On connection got 79.7 Mb/s down 18Mb/s up although various speedcheckers I have tried in the last week have suggested more like 77/17 ish.
NO Call centre , pleasant informed dialogue with person in support - no script !
Expensive ?, do you feel lucky in going to a "bog-standard" ISP and a much longer contract, you can always jump ship after 6 months. Basically you get what you pay for in this world, if I stay , which I probably will , it will cost me £50 monthly for 80/20 with 200GB usage (children are Netflix junkies)
Update 6/6/16 :-
Regrade to Terabyte FTTC TT LLU on 3/6/16 went without a hitch giving BT notice ( after impending price hike) ; now using 2 VOIP numbers from A&A with their far lower call cost . The final bill my wife received last year before we joined A&A (on BT ADSL unlimited Option 3 and Anytime Calls ) was more than the £60 for this package , since then they have hiked line rental twice !

Great support from Michael Barrett in ensuring my FTTP service was installed promptly and effectively; including escalating and following up with Open Reach on several occasions.

Performance and reliability is excellent.

Have used AAISP before and the on going support is very good.

I'm a very satisfied customer of AAISP FTTC at home and have been for a number of years. Routed blocks of v4, failover to route via 3G (bring on the day 4G is enabled!), IPv6, helpful support who will accommodate pretty much any reasonable technical request. When I move house in the coming months to an ADSL2+ only area, I'll be taking advantage of bonding multiple lines on Home::1 to boost my bandwidth too.

This review is about a work project where I managed to engage AAISP. For a temporary location in London, we needed four ADSL2+ Lines over which we could aggregate the bandwidth to create a usable service for up to 75 people. Unfortunately the site was on Exchange Only lines so no FTTC or other options.

This temporary installation included the 4x copper pairs and the ADSL service from AAISP - within fairly short timescales. It was delivered exactly on time, worked perfectly and ensured that I could deliver the service I had promised to the project team. MikeB in AAISP Sales couldn't have been more helpful.

Yes it's more expensive than many other ISP's - but you get what you pay for. I have no problem with that.

With most other ISP's, yes, I'd have been very surprised if they had delivered what I needed, on time and that it worked perfectly. With AAISP, no surprise, I'm now used to them delivering great service and technical solutions.

I will start off by saying this is not the cheapest ISP around. If you want cut price special lock in deals then look elsewhere.

However in my experience you get what you pay for with things like ISPs. Over the years I've had a few problems on various lines and have had some terrible experiences with ISPs getting the issues resolved.

Not so with AA.net. From joining to activation of my line, they were brilliant. Keeping me up to date and letting me know of any changes.

When fibre was almost in my area they set a check so I would know as soon as fibre was available, which was very good of them. When moving to fibre they were equally helpful and the router I decided to get from them for the upgrade was set up and ready. All very nice.

However I ran into a problem where speeds were dropping at night. They traced this to congestion on the BT circuit and raised a fault which got it all sorted very quickly. In comparison my next door neighbour, who also moved to fibre at the same time I did was also suffering the same speed issues at the same times and his ISP were trying to fob him off. You get what you pay for.

AAISP is worth the extra money it costs over a cheaper ISP. If anything ever goes wrong, you can talk to a person in support or sales who actually knows more than you do and can fix things. They take what they do seriously.

Think about how important the internet is to you. I would rather go without heating than without internet service. Do you really want to buy something that important from a company that treats you with contempt?

When you need help, you don't want to waste your time talking to a person reading a script. The few extra pounds AAISP costs is more than worth it. I would never go back.

AAISP are very much the evidence that "you get what you pay for" - yes, you can get a cheaper connection, albeit bundled with 300 TV channels you don't want and a voice line you don't need, and end up paying about the same - but you won't get their level of service and expertise.

Was very pleased when the connection was hooked up, and the speeds were exactly where they should be for an FTTC connection.

Having been a customer of one of the "big name" ISPs for many years, and having fallen foul of their customer service one too many times, I've found A&A to be a breath of fresh air. Support staff who know their stuff and aren't just working from the "have you tried turning it off and on again" script...

Their no-nonsense attitude to digital rights, internet filtering and privacy is the icing on an already very sweet cake.