Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) Reviews

I started to use A&A when, after moving to new house in the middle of nowhere and needing to improve the slow, rural broadband. For a few years, I have used one of their FireBricks to bond three lines together to provide a good quality network connection to home.

Recently, my village has finally been included in the FTTC rollout and so bonding is no longer required as I am lucky enough to get a great FTTC service on a single line.

Throughout my three years with A&A, the service has been exceptionally stable, when blips have occurred there has been clear and open communication on the issue and every effort has been made to resolve the issue promptly.

I have become so use to the quality of A&A's service, and the skill of their staff, that it was quite painful having to contact any other ISP about anything.

Great work - keep it up.

The best thing about AA is that if you have a problem, you can ring their number and speak to someone immediately.

No menus, no foreign call centres, no nonsense.

The other thing is they are a pure ISP. Need an IPv4 or IPv6 block - no problem. Need an unfiltered (un-nannied) pipe to the Internet - that's what they do.

Need low contention so the only limiting factor is how good your physical wire is - they do that.

Need to poke BT Openreach to get something fixed - they are VERY good at that!

Super folk and worth the little extra it costs.

We've used Andrews & Arnold for the last year at a remote business site, and the service has been exceptional. The last 290 days had 100% uptime, and the quality of service is second to none.

If reliability is key, look no further. The Office::1 plan with diverse bonded ADSL2+ lines is the one for you!

I believe so and I believe the answer is AAISP. Excellent service at every turn. The control pages for your line have features you just wont find anywhere else.

No one else comes close. BT can send me junk mail all they like, there's no deal that they could offer that would make me move to them from AAISP.

Great service getting my connection up and running, there were existing problems on the line that had to be resolved and AAISP coordinated this very well. Resolving line problems also sorted out issues with a business neighbour and has now improved their connection albiet my AAISP broadand is 2x speed faster than their BT line!!

I have come to the slow realization that I actually love A&A.

Having been a A&A broadband customer for 14 years straight and I can safely say that their service levels, technical prowess and connectivity levels are utterly unparalleled anywhere.

A&A are not the cheapest of course but you very much get what you pay for and, without wishing to encourage any price rises(!), I would gladly pay more for the impeccable levels of service I get.

I would not and do not hesitate to recommend them to anyone looking for quality xDSL.

You cannot go wrong with A&A.

I've been a software and systems engineer for 15 years, working remotely from abroad for a company back home in Norway. When I recently moved to the UK I needed a reliable Internet connection as soon as possible, and AAISP had me online the day after I moved in.

The connection has proven very reliable, the speed is good (considering I'm on ADSL), and native IPv6 support is fantastic. The staff, who clearly know their stuff, have been very helpful in getting everything arranged. Their online status and management systems are also among the best I've seen, although the user interface could use a fresh coat of paint.

Fairly expensive, but well worth it; I wouldn't hesitate to recommend AAISP for technical users.

I've been using AAISP for over 2 years now, starting on ADSL and recently moving to FTTC. The service is expensive compared to other options (i.e. Virgin) but the price is worth it for the quality & support which outpace any ISP I have previously used.

I also appreciate their stance on providing a proper, unfiltered link to the internet which is also worth a premium to me.

I've always been curious about using AAISP: various friends have used them, and been ecstatic, and I knew Adrian vaguely at university. But the need wasn't pressing: the people I knew who were using AAISP had specialised requirements (VoIP, for example) and I was happy with O2's rebranded Be service, which worked well at my location and was relatively cheap. Native IPv6 would have been nice, but a Hurricane Electric tunnel worked well enough.

Then O2 decided to get out of being an ISP, and took Be down with them. So I switched. And my parents were in the same position, so I switched them as well. ::1 100GB for them, ::1 200GB for me. Not cheap, but not breaking the bank either.

The switchover was painless, and we were all up and running on the agreed date. The supplied Technicolour (Thompson) router didn't quite seem to cope with being connected to a second router with multiple interfaces each with its own /64 (AAISP provide a native /48) so I had an excuse to scratch my Mikrotik itch: because AAISP are run by grown-ups they were perfectly happy to give me support with a Mikrotik 2011 and a DSL 320B in place of their router, whereas O2 always needed me to plug in their router before they would do anything.

Performance is excellent. Support is astoundingly good (albeit office hours only): today I wanted Annex M set up and it was up and running within 20 minutes. There's extensive logging and graphing that you have access to, too, which means self-diagnosis for those with clue is easy.

I can't really fault them. They not cheap, but then that's not their target market. Good support, good network, good people.

Having been with BE for five contented years I migrated to AAISP at the end of March 2014 to avoid being transferred to Sky's substandard and congested network. Faultless and professional from the moment I submitted my MAC and application form. I had previously emailed AAISP, just to clarify a few technical concerns and to ensure I would be put on their TalkTalk backhaul (with no DLM) and received a comprehensive response within hours. Within a couple of days they had sent me all the passwords and information I would need, as well as the pre-configured router, and the changeover was seamless exactly seven days from the day I signed up.
They have proved to be even better than BE, with none of the latter’s intermittent routing issues that occurred during their last year or two of operation. The download speed is equal to what I had with BE and the throughput speed is consistent throughout the day. They also provide native IPv6 connection and monitor the quality of every single line continuously. The user can also see a wealth of Stats for their line and make their own profile changes.
Now it just happens that this morning I experienced my first ever problem in the five months since joining. I noticed that my router had resynced with errors at a slightly slower speed about an hour before I turned on the PC. I therefore restarted the router from the interface but it failed to reconnect. I then tried the same thing again as well as un/re-plugging the router but the fourth green light just went to red. I was on the point of telephoning AAISP when the connection re-established. On checking the AAISP status page it was clear that they had been on top of the problem, which had affected all TalkTalk backhaul users, hours before I was even aware of any issue. The lost connections were caused by a faulty TalkTalk router after a failed upgrade but AAISP quickly re-routed connections through a secondary interconnect to TT and harassed TT until they rolled back their upgrade and the faulty link was restored by lunchtime. I cannot imagine Sky or any of the other mainstream ISPs resolving such a problem, which is after all not of their making, so efficiently. I would assume AAISP has a lot of clout in dealing with TT wholesale, who stand to lose significant business should AAISP go elsewhere for backhaul.
Forthwith I now know I can be confident of a solid uncongested and consistent connection and that any (extremely rare) outage that does occur will be quickly resolved by AAISP. I just feel sorry for all the ex BE/O2 customers who allowed themselves to be migrated to Sky’s network but are now complaining in droves on Sky’s own forum of poor connections, being lied to and non-existent customer service.