Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) Reviews

AAISP is more expensive that some of the other Broadband providers out there, but the extra cost is more than justified by fast speeds, a broad range of options and excellent customer service. Issues are dealt with quickly and efficiently, and on the rare occasions when there are problems, you are kept informed of the issue and resolution. It is very useful to get an email or text message to say that the connection has gone down if you not at the PC. If you like playing with the line settings then there are endless opportunities for tweaking, all of which is supported by AAISP.

I also have a couple of VOIP lines through AAISP, including an AAISP SIM card which saves me nearly £25 a month in call charges compared with my old contract on Orange. Again there are plenty of options to play with and the support is excellent - the people you get on the phone actually know what they are talking about.

So, if you want an ISP you can rely on, with staff who are enthusiastic about the service they provide and you don't like being told to turn your PC / Router off and on again whenever you call Tech Support, AAISP is for you.

I have been with AAISP now for just short of 3 months. I have been with virgin media for about 8yrs and have always had their fastest package, but a house move outside of VM's area put me on ADSL2.

Right from the start AAISP were good, it was great to get on the phone without waiting and speak to someone who actually knows what they are talking about. They gave me honest advice and did not seem to be "selling" to me at all.

It may seem a little expensive in comparison to some providers but you get what you pay for in terms of support, reliability and speed. As far as I can tell they have not cut corners anywhere.

They are also happy to give you multiple static IP addresses which is great for me :)

If you are sick of the constant data mining, collection and general big brother mentality I am sure you will appreciate this: http://aaisp.net.uk/news-censorship.html

TL;DR
Great ISP, worth every penny.

Moved over to AAISP from O2 back in May 2011. Decision was based purely on requirement for strong technical support and customer services which I was willing to pay more on in moving from ADSL2+ to FTTC. Quite a big cost jump for me from O2 (who were an excellent provider when I used them).

That said, they are truly an excellent ISP. Connection has never been a problem and their incident management and communication to blips and faults when they seldomly happen is top notch and leaves me assured of being in good hands.

You get access to a your own control pages to tweak settings on your line, monitor usage and do other things probably I'm not that tech savvy to understand.

Understanding their tariff pricing on usage, may require some changes in your household on what to do during the day and evenings/weekends.

Service has been fantastic. On rare occasions where the overall ISP usage has been high and speed dropped down, they've bought extra capacity and told customers. I mean, how good is that!

I think AASIP are suited to business and technical types of customers who will appreciate all the expertise available. The Director even published his own straight-talking blog, which provides insight into the challenges his company faces with the big telco's and the latest on technical enhancements they are planning for services.

Recently, became part of the FTTC trial and notched up speeds of 54 down and 13 up in speedtests. Amazing what can be done on a partly copper line nowadays.

Kudos AAISP.

I picked A&A after reading the reviews on here. We were moving house and I'd been disappointed with Fast at the last place. This house is at the end of a long line, BT were forecasting speeds of around 2 meg. So far we're getting nearly 7MB! I love the text message service to let you know if there's a problem - our line was brought down by a tree and I had a text straight away telling me the carrier was down. It took BT nearly a week to fix it mind...In the little contact I've had to have with A&A, they've been quick, courteous and helpful, and I feel confident they'll fix any problems that do come up (apart from fallen trees obviously!)

Bit pricey but then you get what you pay for. Lots of techie stuff available as well, not that I understand most of it! Well chuffed so far.

Hello,

I changed from a mainstream broadband provider to AAISP 2 months ago and I wonder now why I didn't change before.
I had just moved in and there was many problem on the new line that would have never been ( or very slowly and painfully) fixed by BT otherwise.

They provided you with a web dashboard where you can see the accurate usage along with stats of the line like the BRAS... You can even run BT tests on the line from there and see BT activities.

Obviously it is a bit technical but nothing that can't be overcome I think( Note that I'm an IT network engineer so it is difficult to judge)

I only contacted them by email and they usually answer within 4-5 hours or at worse 24hours. Answers were always coherent with issue, no one is reading a script here.

On top of this, the administrative part is clear and simple, there is no little line, I really like that. In fact that's what made me change in first place. I couldn't stand the "shoot yourself in the foot" contracts from Sky and others.

So to sum up, I think AAISP service is great so far!

I'm on BT's infamous Poplar exchange (LNPOP) which is arguably the worst in the country, presumably due to overcrowding from Canary Wharf, a very high local population density, and the Olympics), and despite being less than 1500m from the exchange have consistently suffered poor throughput - typically 1.5-2.5Mb/s for the last 7 or so years. Not even ZenADSL, who are a great ISP, could do anything about this despite a lot of effort on my and their part. In desperation I reluctantly left them and migrated to Orange for their spare LLU capacity - general consensus on the forums at the time was that LLU was generally a lot better, and Orange were estimating they could get me around 9Mb/s. But it was a total nightmare. Orange are utterly incompetent and I wasted hours wading through Indian call centres, getting treated like a complete novice (I am an IT professional) before getting through to a technical support team which could only play the buck-passing game with BT, were not often sympathetic, and sometimes even plain rude. Eventually I got them to admit that that estimate was way off and that they had missold the package to me.

Finally one day I discovered A&A, and in particular their "We'll Fix Your Line" offer:

http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-trial.html

and since then all has been sweetness and light. Their technical support is superb and personal (you never feel like they are in a rush to get you off the phone before the problem is resolved), the speeds are way better, and they give you an AWESOME web interface with more details about your service than you could ever dream of. The CQM graphs are incredibly useful. I recently switched from a fairly average BT WBC backhaul (~3.5Mb/s) to a BE backhaul, and now my download throughput is around 6Mb/s which, while not amazing relative to many parts of the country, is pretty good for this area where many people are still struggling with less than 1Mb/s. Additionally they are aggressively pushing their upstream providers and modem router vendors to improve IPv6 support, and are leading the field in this respect.

Sure, I pay a premium for this quality of service (A&A don't have the economies of scale of the larger ISPs), but I rely on this service too much for that to be a major worry. Generally with ISPs in the UK I've found that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

In summary I'd recommend A&A to anyone willing to pay a bit extra for quality, but particularly to highly technical users (even their director is a hardcore hacker - check his blog at http://revk.www.me.uk/) and to anyone who has line quality issues which their current ISP is unable or unwilling to resolve.

If you are browsing the web looking for a ISP to switch to, AAISP should certainly be considered; they are possibly the best ISP in the UK at the moment. I chose A&A when I moved recently. RM unsurprisingly botched the delivery of the Billion router (which is offered free, and retails at nearly _£150_), however once connected, A&A activated our ADSL service within 5 minutes of paying the usual connection fee. So far, a solid, dependable service, 7800 down and 488 up (on dodgy 80s copper, carrying ~8200), with _very_ low latency.

Although I live in an ADSL20 area, A&A also offer connections on ADSL21, Be, FTTP etc at prices based on usage rather than the "possible" connection speed or indeed the type of connection.

Not only this, they also include (limited) web/email hosting, a block of static IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, the best customer support going, they don't censor the web, they don't use NAT, and more and more and more.

Prices are in units which can be confusing at first, but it roughly works out that 1 unit = 1 1/4GB between the hours of 9am-6pm, Monday to Friday, and 50gb at all other times. For those who are in the office, or otherwise not sitting around on the web during working hours, you won't be disappointed. Otherwise, you may need to limit your daytime usage - it's quite easy, with some light browsing and a couple of YouTube videos, to use well in excess of 150mb over a couple of hours, and at £3-£4 a unit, that could get very pricey.

AAISP aren't the cheapest, but you get what you pay for. After having had flaky Virgin cable and O2 DSL, I currently have a Be line from AAISP and it Just Works(TM). Internet you don't have to think about. The way it should be :-)

I've been with Andrew's and Arnold for nearly two years now. I've always had consistant speeds and good latency.

They have been far more reliable than any of my other ISP's and when I recently had a problem with poor connection speeds they responded to my complaint very very quickly. Turned out BT were upgrading but hadn't bothered to tell anyone!

First class communication and all too happy to help. Far better than others who only take action when you threaten to leave!

The limits are very good too and its easy to swap and changed from one product to another.
You certainly get what you pay for.

If like me you are trawling the net and researching which ISP to gamble on AAISP is the place to be!

My criteria was a new connection which offered a 1 month contract with the best usage/price ratio.

After reading some good reviews on this site and others, I took the leap and signed up with AAISP.

Having moved to a new flat in a town where cable wasn't available, I expected a sizable drop in performance. Prior to ordering a phone line I was quoted as getting between 7mb-17mb with an average of 12mb. I was reasonably happy with this but once the new line was connected and tested the predicted line speed dropped. Tests on the phone line predicted an average of 5-7mb.

Deciding to go through with the install (which included a free pre-configured router), I was pleasantly surprised to be receiving a slightly higher speed at around 9mb. A few days down the line and this speed had increased substantially to 15mb down and 1mb up.

A month down the line and i'm still receiving this great speed with no downtime as of yet!

Regarding the slightly scary unit system used by AAISP, it's a case of trial and error on how much you will need. I started off with an order of 4 units at £26/month. Having started the contract halfway through the month I was given a pro rata amount until the month end. When the new month began I was happy to learn my left over units (0.58) were carried forward.

It is now the 17th October (over halfway through the month) and I have 3.55 of my 4 units remaining. Bearing in mind I consider myself a medium-heavy user with regular downloading and streaming this is brilliant.

One thing I would say AAISP is best suited to those using their connection at off peak times (6pm-9am & weekends).
To illustrate this I currently have 1.7gb of peak usage (9am-6pm) which equals 0.7 units. This usage includes mainly browsing with the odd YouTube video, so you can see how heavy usage can quickly use up units.
In contrast I have downloaded just under 33gb off peak (between 6pm-9am & weekends)which converts to 0.33 units. Essentially I could download 400gb/month if I didn't use my connection between 9-6. With my current rate of usage I am considering dropping down units to 3 (about £23/month).

I cannot comment on customer service as I haven't had any problems however I have received numerous courtesy emails ensuring i'm happy with the service.

Overall I have to mark AAISP 10/10 across the board as the service has gone beyond my expectations at a price more competitive than the other ISPs I considered.