Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) Reviews

I was with A&A up until 2009 when I moved away to Ireland...they were sorely missed. Unless you live in Dublin, Galway or Cork, Ireland's fixed line ADSL in rural areas (and a sizable percentage of the population live rurally) reminds me of the UK ADSL situation ten years ago. Eircom are the dominant provider and given their current financial state there's not much investment going on outside of very high density population areas.

I moved back to Scotland in January and immediately ordered A&A's Home::1 service. When the service went live my BRAS profile seemed to be stuck at 2MB despite the router syncing at ~8Mb/s. Given that I'm about 300 yards from the exchange this seemed a bit iffy and I expected a bit more than that (it's a 20CN Market 1 exchange so 8MB is the best to be expected). I emailed support and within three hours they had the issue resolved with BT...well done folks.

The level of transparency with regards to fault progress is also something other ISP's could learn from. It's quite nice to be able to watch A&A's interactions with BT in your online account.

Many of my friends don't understand why I pay £35/month (I have the 150GB high user add-on) for broadband - however *I* know exactly why I keep using A&A. I know stuff will get fixed and I know the service will be consistently fast and reliable 24x7.

At the end of the day you get what you pay for, ADSL is important for me (I do a lot of work from home) and I just can't risk crappy customer service, drawn out break-fix times, congestion and incompetence from the "unlimited" tenner a month suppliers.

If you want ADSL done properly then there is no other reasonable choice of provider.

I have not had a bad experience with AAISP in the 3 years I've used them as my home ADSL provider. The line is always stable, they've been very helpful during the ordering process and they know what they're doing. If only other companies (not just in this sector) were as good to deal with.

We're an IT company up in Newcastle, but far enough out in the sticks that internet access is an issue. We used to enjoy 5Mpbs connections through Demon, then moved to a bonded system through a local ISP called Wildcard which gave us 7Mbps.

Then a numpty crashed into the BT cabinet at the end of the street, and our speeds died along with it. The Maximum we could get was 3Mbps and the bonded line kept dropping.

We discussed EFM as an option, but decided to switch to a 4 line 21CN system from AAISP, expecting 4x 3Mb so about 12Mbps. I thought in for a penny in for a pound, so ordered 4 brand spanking new phone lines too!

That bit was worth every penny.. While the Engineer was installing them I took my little ADSL2 tester up and found 1 line syncing at 6Mpbs, but the others down at 3Mpbs so I asked the engineer to investigate.

Turns out there's more than 1 cable between the cabinet & the exchange, and the cable all my other lines on had been joined.

The BT engineer politely moved all 4 lines onto the faster cable - so I owe him big thanks!

Anyway - after the lines have settled I now get 24Mbps!

The only problem is I can now see us chewing through our bandwidth allowance quicker :(

Now, had the original ISP been a bit more proactive with the speed issue we would probably have stayed - but despite having multiple BT engineers telling us the line was fine we knew we'd had better performance before.

In summary : AAISP - fast connection, good communication, not cheap but value for money.

Technically probably the most competent in the UK, but beware that outside their office hours technical support is only available by internet (bad if you've lost your only connection!) and then only if they happen to be around (which they often are).
But you will probably get the best quality internet service available on your line by using them.

After a decade with Demon I finally moved to Aaisp two days ago.
It's early days but it is a pleasure to be with these guys. Telephones answered quickly by people for whom English is their first language. What will they think of next?
Ah yes broadband speed that is something like it is advertised to be. And the speed is constant over all hours of the day.
I was always worried that moving would be difficult and messy - it wasn't.

I know that these guys are a bit more expensive but so far they are worth it.

As other comments note here, this isn't the cheapest ISP, but what they offer to those of us who like tinkering is invaluable.

Where else can you get a static IPv4 address, a /48 block of IPv6, no traffic shaping or filtering and constant quality monitoring with the base package? I can log into my control panel and get a clear graph of whether anything is wrong with my connection, change line parameters, issue line tests or get a description of the communication going on between AA and the line provider (BT, in my case).

I've also ran a few tests on the connection and measured latency and DNS resolution times, two very important metrics that are often ignored. I was happy to find out that the latencies were some of the lowest I've seen, and DNS resolution is even faster than Google's public DNS. Bandwidth is of course maxed out on my ADSL line (as in, the connection is as fast as the line allows).

I suspect that a lot of users won't get much benefit from all the tinkering options, but they will still get a great connection and a support staff that actually know what they're doing. As an example, I requested a change in tariffs the other day, and after just a few minutes, not only had the change been made, but retroactively applied to the current month.

I'm very happy to spend some extra money on a fast, stable connection with knowledgeable support staff, and I suspect I'll keep doing so for a long time.

There's a big difference between cheap, and value for money. AAISP fall onto this scale at the "excellent value for money" end. For the (nearly) ten years we've had a business relationship with them, we have rarely needed to contact their tech-support - the service typically Just Works - but when we have had to, it has always resulted in getting to speak to someone who will listen to you, understand the problem and then fix it. Other ISPs could learn a thing or two from them.

We use a bonded link setup, and have just added two more lines to give us higher speed download and upload. Both lines' ADSL were provisioned quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, there were faults on both lines from the off, with massive packet loss apparent. We could see this packet loss quite quickly - within 5 minutes of powering the modems on, thanks to the CQM (constant quality monitoring) that AAISP provide to all customers as standard. We reported these faults immediately, although I suspect that if left, AAISP would have picked up on the packet loss on the lines anyway and would have actioned fixes themselves.
Throughout the repair process on these lines, AAISP were courteous and helpful, and made efforts to keep us in the loop as to what was happening between them and BT (although some of the conversation is incomprehensible, it is refreshing to see that your ISP is communicating with BT on your behalf; just how much communication there is is quite an eye-opener, too).
Both lines are, as of writing, fixed and working and configured into our aggregated links setup.
I couldn't be happier with how AAISP handled the situation.

It is their continued adherence to this level of service - and their ongoing commitment to excellence - which justifies the cost.

It is refreshing to do business with such a straight-talking, honest and technically competent company.

Even though AAISP isn't necessarily the cheapest option, it quickly justifies the slightly higher price with far superior speed and service.

As it's a smaller ISP, you receive attention as an individual rather that just another number.

I haven't experienced any contention slowdown issues at all. I always get the full speed that my line supports (33 Mbits FTTC in my case).

You also get a great control panel with usage reports, sync speeds and quite a bit more...

AAISP came highly recommended by my colleagues and obviously from reviews on here, but I was initially unsure as I kept hearing how great they are for various technical reasons. Although I'm a techie by profession, at home I just want simple straightforward broadband. I don't want to care how great their technical support is, because I don't want to have any problems.

A couple of providers had appropriate download limits for my needs, and I ultimately chose AAISP because I *did* have a problem with my line. I'd moved house and had a newly activated account on an existing BT line - but for some strange reason BT's database claimed by line was tagged by an LLU provider. Strange since there is no LLU for this exchange, just a basic 21CN line.

AAISP were just great. I'd already talked to BT about the tag, but they claimed there wasn't one. AAISP warned me that it'd take time for them to sort it out with BT and that it'd be quicker if I could get them to clear the tag, but since BT denied there was one, I was stuck and willing to wait.

AAISP queried the tag and were told that it was an open PSTN order. They passed this on to me, and once again I phoned BT, this time armed with the terms "tags query", "tags database", "bt openreach", "PSTN order".... I was told once again that there was no tag, but this time I was told that there *was* a PSTN tag but it had since been cleared... I was told somewhat sternly that this was not my concern and my ISP should be sorting it out.

Back to AAISP. They rechecked, and the tag had been cleared. They think that the previous occupiers broadband hadn't ceased until after I'd tried to get mine.

Why am I so positive about AAISP, when they apparently didn't "do" anything? Because they talked to me, there was always a real, informed person responding quickly. Because they didn't try to shrug off responsibility. Because I could constantly swee progress on their online order tracking system. I felt very "looked after", and I was confident that somehow the situation would be resolved.


Also, they _somehow_ spotted that I'd ordered the wrong router! I picked a single port one with no wireless, when I had intended to get the wireless one. I was asked to confirm my choice plenty of time before I needed the router, so corrected the order without any delay.

The line has been active for 1 week. No problems with the router, which came pre configured and just needed to be plugged in (they also supply a filter). The speed is as good as I'd expect from a basic line (about 7Mbps). Latency reported on WoW is about 20ms. MUCH better than O2 on a similar line (but closer to the exchange) at my old house.

The "2 unit" default tariff is 100GB off peak monthly limit, which as I said is appropriate to my needs and well priced. The online usage monitoring is slightly techie-porn, but easy enough to use.

Very happy.

When moving from an office in the centre of a Town (that had Fibre internet from both Virgin and BT) to a rural office, we had terrible problems getting a reliable service with a decent speed.

We had problems with our VoIP service due to lack of upstream bandwidth on the very long line to our office.

We had problems with our backups due to downstream bandwidth (was taking longer than a week to transfer a weeks worth of backups)

After discussion with BT on when our line would support FTTC we were basically told "never" and our only option was a very expensive etherflow solution.

All hope was seemingly lost on getting a stable, speedy connection for our rural offices that didn't cost the earth.

After discussions with the very helpful staff at A&A (via their very convenient IRC channel as well as via phone), the possibility of bonding multiple lines together came up. I was only aware of this previously as a technical possibility but wasn't aware that ISPs could actually do t his!

So, we had three lines installed and bonded together.

We went from 5Mbps down and 460Kbps up, to 13Mbps down and 1.7Mbps up

Although more expensive than simply having one line, this option gave us a usable connection on our very long line, without having to resort to installing fibre at the cost of many thousands of pounds.

The staff at Andrews and Arnolds clearly described what was needed at our side, and configured the kit before sending it out, with it almost being a plug and play solution.

All in all I am very happy with the solution they provided.

They aren't the cheapest, but the service types and service levels they offer cannot be matched.

Anyone that needs something over and above the cheap mainstream solutions can do no better than look at A&A