Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) Reviews

I've used AAISP for a number of years, primarily as a backup service for my satellite broadband because where I lived the phone was connected via damp string (or, that's what it felt like) and broadband speeds were diabolical. What I noticed there was that although it was a slow service, it never dropped out and never varied in speed.
I recently moved house to an area where Superfast Broadband was available and decided to stick with AAISP and I have no regrets from doing so. The service was connected when they said it would be and was as fast as they predicted (75Mbps - bliss!!).
AAISP may not be the cheapest supplier but from my perspective they are worth every penny of what you pay and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone.

Having had cable broadband with Virgin (and before them Telewest/Blueyonder) I was wary about jumping to a DSL service with its reliance on BT somewhere along the line. However Virgin's dreadful customer service finally tipped me over the edge and having done some research and contacted a couple of ISPs I went for AAISP.

In spite of mistakes on my part with my order AAISP resolved everything smoothly ensuring I had no charges for cancelled BT visits. Quick response to e-mails, always called back promptly when they said they would and very clear in answering my technical queries about VDSL/FTTC.

All in and working, consistently fast and responsive. No need to access tech support for problems or configuring additional services yet but I'm confident this will be good from my experience with AAISP so far.

You will find cheaper ISPs than AAISP, quite a lot cheaper, but you get what you pay for. AAISP clearly invest in their staff, customer service and tech support and for me it's money well spent.

As broadband has just reached our area for the first time (Jan 2015), I was keen to use an ISP with a high service score and chose A&A based on reviews on this site

The entire process went very smoothly, responses from the service desk were quick and informative and the speed with which the service came on-line surprised the Open Reach engineer

Highly recommended

I was recommended to this provider as my current provider had huge speed issues especially in peak times.
I am not a technical person in the slightest but I can say that I have been really happy with the speed and the service I have received from them has been excellent and I will be recommending them to other people.

I've been using AAISP for about a year. I was a relatively satisfied Be customer fishing about for a new ISP after that firm was acquired by Sky.

I probably happened upon AAISP from an article about government attempts to sanitise the internet via ineffective web filtering. Once I'd seen the website and AAISP's attitude to filtering, censorship and privacy, I was half way to signing up. Asking around, one or two friends were already using AAISP and didn't hesitate to recommend them.

Overall I am extremely happy to be an AAISP customer. The changeover was easy, the preconfigured router being pretty much plug and play. The supplier change was handled without much needed from my end. The router AAISP supplied is the same brand that Be provided, but a different model. The user interface is virtually identical, and it's easy to use, if a bit slow. I would prefer it if AAISP supplied a router with (or compatible with) open source software (eg OpenWRT) but so far I've had no problems with the functionality.

It seems that there is an assumption on AAISP's part that their customers have a lot more technical expertise than customers of the big industry players. That's probably true, but that could well be down to AAISP's communications and content in the first place. I feel they could do more to attract people alienated by some of the techy language but who would love to be customers due to their public position on important issues. It's good that you get through to someone who understands any issues you might be experiencing, but I've had to ask staff to repeat explanations in English as I don't understand the acronyms and other technical terms they sometimes use.

I also feel the AAISP website and user account interfaces could do with a major redesign with the help of a UX designer and information architect. Products/services need to be more clearly structured and segregated from other information and advice, and user account information/data is hard to understand without an explanation. It has the look and feel of something built by and for technical people for internal use, rather than for customers of all levels of skill and experience.

Things haven't been completely plain sailing. I've had replies to PGP encrypted emails in plain text which included my original text, defeating the point of using encryption in the other direction. Also, when we moved home, a mistake made by AAISP staff meant that getting our supply up and running again was delayed by a few days. We were also double charged a month around the same time. That said, as the mistake was at their end, AAISP put effort in to solve the issue quickly, so credit is due again.

I am endlessly impressed by the stand the company and its MD take on issues of freedom of speech and privacy. Indeed, how many other ISPs even accept PGP encrypted emails to their support team, even if they sometimes respond a bit strangely?

As for the internet supply itself - it's always worked fine for me, running one PC over Ethernet and several devices over Wi-Fi in a fairly large flat. I could find cheaper elsewhere, but you get what you pay for. In that sense, AAISP is excellent value. I've recommended AAISP to a number of friends and I know that some have become customers as a result.

You want an ISP that delivers a good service, reliably. Many ISP's will do this. But when things go wrong, you want support, great support, and things to get fixed. This is where AAISP shines.
I worked from home, for IBM, and was with BT, because that's what IBM provided. My ADSL would fail, then recover up to ten times per day. Continual complaints got me nowhere, so I decided to find my own ISP, at my own expense, and AAISP promised to get my ADSL fixed.
As soon as I was connected via AAISP, they took action. BT engineers started appearing, nearly every day, but no fault was found. After about a week, things went up a gear. I had four Openreach vans parked outside my house, and seven BT engineers, peering at every conceivable point of failure.
They even came on Sunday! Towards the end of the day, a BT engineer knocked on the door and sheepishly admitted that they'd found the problem. The roof of the exchange was leaking... right above their ADSL rack. My circuit ran through the card at the top. There was moss growing on it... the ADSL got fixed the following day.
I've been with AAISP ever since. Yes, I could get a cheaper deal, but I know who's there, should I need help again.
Support: As Nigel Tufnel (Spinal Tap) said: "These go to 11"
Speed: I live in the "wrong sort of place", but my speed beats all my neighbours.
Value: Yes, they cost more, and most of the time you won't notice the difference, but when your ADSL goes wrong, you'll notice.
I've been with AAISP ever since.

AAISP provide a service that is very different to your typical ISP.

We signed up for 80/20 FTTC on the Home::1 tariff. The predicted line speed on BT Wholesale was marginal for 80/20, so we wanted to be able to switch down to 40/10 without issue.

We are exceptionally heavy Internet users (200-300GB/month) so also required an increased quota.

Of course, all of this comes at a cost, costing more than most of their competitors. But with this, we get:
* Low and consistent latency - 9ms whatever the time of the day.
* No throttling or speed restrictions. Our old ISP used to throttle if we used the Internet heavily in the day, despite being "unlimited". The advantage of AAISP not having an unlimited tariff is that they can pay for the bandwidth they need and guarantee you get the best speeds.
* No monitoring - I know that they have no systems in place to store any communications data. This is very important to us.
* IPv6 working, out of the box. Each one of our network devices has it's own IPv6 address.
* No NAT - we have added a block of IPv4 addresses, allowing us to ditch NAT.
* No restrictions on running servers on your line.
* Tech support available by IRC and email, very proactive, very knowledgeable.
* Comprehensive line monitoring including throughput, latency and usage.
* Their ethos is to maintain your privacy and digital rights, in stark contrast to the big ISPs.

After ~12 days of 80/20 service, we decided we would switch down to 40/10 service as the difference was marginal. This was done simply by sending an email.

If you rely on the Internet, want functionality like IPv6, or are simply fed up with government monitoring, AAISP is for you.

As a quick addition - I do a lot of network scans for penetration testing. For a start, most ISPs technically don't allow this. AAISP do. But the 9ms latency means that scans run exceptionally fast compared to competitors.

In Early 2013, with the news that our SDSL lines had just over a year before they would be withdrawn, and with the growing inter-branch traffic and reliability issues becoming a issue to our EntaNet supplied services, PHC started the process of looking for a new ISP to service our (at the time) 4 branches and 3 Directors Homes.

A&A were shortlisted for a number of reasons; they offered a high quality service (their reputation within the industry for doggedly chasing BT on issues is well known), as well as being very flexible in terms of what they offered due to being relatively small (boutique, if you will!). We spent some time discussing the options with not just A&A but several other providers, before boiling it down based upon our knowledge of how they worked and the service offered.

Price was a factor, but we were also conscious that we wanted a provider who could actually get BT to deliver what was promised. Our experience with Enta was that while we couldn’t fault their network, it was always the last mile that provided the biggest problems.

Thankfully, at the time, FTTC became available at our two main locations (Bristol & Cardiff) so we chose to install A&A’s Office::1 product at both locations with Bonded 80/20 FTTC in Bristol, and Bonded 40/10 in Cardiff. Our other locations received A&A’s Units based tariffs, and one Director’s home was also migrated from a FTTC. We staged our rollout of the new services over a number of months, to avoid problems with BT and where possible installed the new service on a second line. Shortly after switching the last line over in Mid 2013, we opened a new branch in Swindon, and had a new circuit installed there also.

We also took the decision to have every line managed by A&A with their broadband only phone line option, as this provided us with a single point of contact when it comes to our broadband needs. Our experiences with BT have been appalling since (a number of mistakes made by them including leaving a branch with no phones for over 2 weeks due to an ISDN migration issue, and configuration issues on another new install ISDN that caused us a lot of headaches) but when it’s come to our broadband lines, we’ve been very happy leaving them with A&A, despite BT’s attempts to poach them back!

Visibility and control of the lines is outstanding, the control panel provided by A&A allows me total visibility of the lines at a glance, and we can see when things have lost sync or gone offline. I get text messages when lines go Up/Down, which is handy, and our broadband availability in our Bristol & Cardiff branches has been near on 100% for the last year. As our business grows, A&A’s offerings will grow with it, and we’re confident that we made the right decision going with them. We’re now a year and a half down the line, and would definitely recommend them to others (and frequently do!).

I've been with AAISP since 2011, starting with a 20CN connection on BT, then a free upgrade to a 20MB Talk Talk connection. Recently I've moved to a 40MB FTTC connection on BT.
Over the years I've only had few problems with my connection but when there have been issues (DDOS amplification attack, speed dropping off) support has always been excellent. There were no issues in increasing my IPV4 address allocation so I don't have to use NAT and IPV6 'just works'. I can run my own email, web and DNS servers. On technical issues (DNS, domain registration) they are knowledgeable, polite and helpful especially at the point where my technical understanding runs out.
Prior to my recent move to FTTC they gave me some really useful advice which enabled me to get the Openreach engineer to do the installation exactly how I wanted it (moving master sockets using existing internal wiring).
As others have pointed out there is a cost for this efficiency and knowledge but this is only applicable if you are comparing it to the cost of a pure 'consumer' service. Other ISPs would be charging me business rates for the connection I have from AAISP and at appropriate charging levels. On a 'like for like' basis AAISP provide a reliable, technically 1st class, cost effective service. On top of all this you get a proper grown up unfiltered connection - it's a nanny free zone.

I migrated to A&A about a year ago onto their Home::1 package and was put onto their Talktalk backhaul which gives me a good measure of control over my line. In the year I have been with them I have had a good solid connection with excellent speeds and no significant issue until the early hours of a recent Saturday morning my router started syncing, holding sync for a minute or so,usually long enough for authentication to take place, then dropping sync and starting all over again.

I tried all the usual things at home such as a different router, connecting to the master socket etc. to no avail. Unfortunately, A&A don't provide support out of business hours and while they wouldn't have been able to do much as it turned out to be an exchange fault, it would have been nice to have been able to talk to someone. To their credit support staff are often available on their IRC channel, but with no broadband and all but no mobile phone reception here,there was no way of contacting anyone.

On Monday morning I phoned A&A, the phone was answered within seconds by Alan who ran through the problem with me, went through all the checks I had already done, as he was required to do, and concluded that it was almost certainly an external fault and raised the issue with Talktalk, who arranged for a BT OR engineer to come out on Wednesday.

Due to a detected line fault the first engineer was not a broadband man but he did as much as he could and rectified a line fault. I contacted Alan immediately and he arranged for a broadband engineer to come on Thursday who spent a considerable amount of time on the case and rectified the fault with a lift and shift on Talktalk's kit in the exchange.

Throughout the whole exercise Alan kept me informed of progress and checked how things were going at my end.

The good things here are that I was able to speak the same person at A&A every time I called, the phone was answered quickly every time, and the case was followed through to a successful conclusion.

In the not too distant future I should be able to get FTTC and I have considered migrating to a different ISP, partly for cost reasons but also due to the cap on downloads that A&A impose. However,after this experience I am inclined to pay the higher cost of staying with A&A and hope that they will see fit to increase their Home::1 allowance to 200GB so as to be competitive with people like IDNet and to some extent Zen. The 100GB cap isn't much of an issue for me at the moment but it could easily become so and the extra £10/month to raise the cap would make A&A much more expensive.

So, yes, A&A have lived up to their reputation and have proved to be a first class ISP. It's a bit like insurance, a cheap ISP is OK when things work, but when things go wrong you need people who can and will get things done.

Thank you Alan, and everyone at A&A.

Adrian