Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) Reviews

I have been with AAISP for 15 years and I can't recall any significant outage. On the very few occasions I have had a query, the telephone has been answered immediately by a most helpful person.

I have used AAISP for at least 15 years. It was always expensive relative to the mass market suppliers but that is more than off-set by the quality of the service. To be able to talk directly to highly knowledgeable and skilled support staff more than compensates. On top of that the service is essentially a clean one for adults free of any constraints or controls on access to internet sites.

A month or so ago, I upgraded to VDSL and coincidentally the service started to experience periodic interruptions. On reporting this to AAISP support, I was patiently talked through a series of sensible and properly considered steps to investigate the problem which was eventually identified as not being outside the home but to my local set-up. Now all is sorted and I am enjoying a down speed of 79887kbps and upload speeed of 19999kbps.

What a breath of fresh air to be with an ISP so knowledgeable and personal. It's like a personalised boutique experience and the breadth of information available about my account is amazing.
Recommended unconditionally!!

I have been veery impressed with the service provided by AAISP - before I went through the trouble free setting up AAISP process the downloads speed was tested at 1.74Mbps and upload 0.75 Mbps but today tests at 36.9 Mpbs and 15.5 Mbps respectively and the previous test on 4/1/2018 was 62.1 Mbps and 18.7 Mbps respectively.

The router was shipped to my address in good time and the two page A4 setting up instructions was a model of clarity.

I had A&A recommended to me by a bunch of work colleagues. I work in tech and it was pitched to me as an ISP that know what they’re doing and will speak to you like you do as well.

Yep, it’s more expensive than the competition. I don’t care. I’ve always been happy to pay over the odds for a service that’s better than everything else, and that’s precisely what’s going on here. If you want to phone a support line and be on hold for an hour, followed by an infuriating conversation with someone who could easily be replaced with an automated number menu (if they haven’t already), or you want a service that’s as transparent as a brick wall, you go ahead and save yourself a tenner a month.

We are lucky to be in an area where FTTP has been rolled out and on the day the Openreach checker said it was available I placed my order with AA.

The order was confirmed straight away. Two days later I had a confirmed installation date for the following Friday! Couldn’t believe how quick this was.

Had a couple of emails from the AA sales team about the install and they kept me updated.

On the morning of the install, the Openreach man arrived before 8am (turned out this was his 2nd FTTP install). A minor hiccup (the cable crosses the road and he needed someone else to help with this) and our new connection was live by lunchtime.

We have been using a bonded pair of FTTC lines beforehand (again with AA) and it’s amazing the difference.

Couldn’t recommend AA more. They might not be the cheapest out there, however they offer so much more in value.

Right, I’m going to get the usual gripes out of the way - yes, AAISP are damn expensive, especially for high-usage households, and having usage limits/metering is unusual an an “unlimited” world (T&C’s apply etc etc).

It’s very difficult for me to justify AAISP to friends and colleagues because of that, and they say I’m bonkers for paying what I pay. Some of them put up with utter nonsense from their ISP’s, just because it’s cheap, or because they got freebies for a two-year sign-up.

Nuts to that. Life’s too short for dealing with flaky internet and messing about with “help” desks that can’t actually help you.

That’s why I switched to AAISP over ten years ago when Nildram imploded, and I’ve been with them ever since.

The service has been fast and very reliable, other than occasional blips. This is where AAISP’s support prove themselves to be head-and-shoulders over the competition - ring their support number or drop them an e-mail, and you’ll get a response from a REAL person who can actually help you, not someone on another continent reading from a script. They will make sure that you’ve checked everything you can at your end, but once they’ve ruled out your equipment and wiring, they will chase BT (or TalkTalk if your service is provided on a TalkTalk connection) and they’ll keep pestering until your problem is solved.

I had a problem with excessive peak latency a couple of years back, and they took this all the way up to the top levels of OpenReach to sort it out. Even the MD got involved !

http://www.revk.uk/2015/03/some-times-bt-just-dont-understand.html

They have a secret weapon - answers to the name “Shaun”, likes BT managers, but will eat normal food if required. The rest of the support folks are pretty good at giving BT/TT a hard time too. They’ll even take on new customers with existing broadband faults and try to fix them, with a money-back guarantee if they can’t.

They also have a policy of “not being the bottleneck” in providing service - and they have delivered on that promise in the past if links appeared to be overly busy.

This is what makes them more expensive - but it’s also what makes them good.

They still get 10/10 across the board from me, even for "value" - that's because I “value” having a consistently fast, reliable service, with tech support that doesn’t treat me like an idiot.

DEC 2017 UPDATE: I've been on Home::1 1Tb for just over 18 months - don't let the fact it's provided via TalkTalk put you off, it's a MUCH better grade of service than you get with TalkTalk Retail.

I recently migrated from BT Infinity 2, after BT's latest announcement of price rises. Opting for the Home::1 FTTC 1TB service, I also chose to migrate my telephone line and number. The price will be a couple of pounds a month than I was paying BT, but now I'm dealing with a responsive and knowledgeable team, and benefiting from additional functionality in the form of VOIP hosting and a sane IPv6 implementation.

The service from AAISP has been of the highest quality - from the moment I placed my order, continuing through the management of the change-over, and in all my subsequent dealings with sales and technical support.

The timetable for the migration was accurate and was adhered to precisely. I couldn't be more satisfied.

AAISP is an excellent ISP. I’ve been with them for eight years now and have just upgraded to FTTC. The recent regrade from ADSL to FTTC was totally painless. I agreed a change over date and the regrade happened that morning, with the line being off for only 15 minutes. They didn’t even need access to the property as I already had an AAISP router/modem installed that could cope with the change of protocol. In the early days AAISP were a bit on the expensive side, but now they have rejigged their pricing I’d give them top marks for value for money. Every interaction I’ve had with their support team has been excellent, wth a prompt and sensible response.

I was originally with Zen but had issues with my first connection and line which were never really resolved. I decided enough was enough so ordered a second line from AAISP (SoHo::1 2TB on VDSL2) and a few weeks following the order the Openreach engineer installed it. My second line was on a new line card which had newer a ECI firmware (d086) and gave me a nice speed boost compared to my first line with Zen.

So, where to begin... lets start with customer service. Excellent! I had to make use of it initially before the order was installed. What happened was I wanted to try L2TP for a simple speed test over my problematic Zen connection but I didn't realise this would then make the system believe the line was installed. Understandably I was in a bit of panic so first thing the following morning I contacted AAISP to explain and was prepared to pay upcoming charges as long as the installation date was unaffected. Thankfully nothing was harmed and the upcoming charges were even cancelled!

After the service was installed I noticed that unfortunately this line was also suffering with a line issue (excessive error seconds on the downstream). On my Zen connection I was also suffering with slow single threaded download speeds and packet loss blips, where on the new AAISP connection it was fine. So anyway, I went to AAISP's IRC to ask if I should report this potential line issue even though the CIDT (PSTN) test was passing fine on the control panel. Shaun told me they should be able to help with this.

Four SFI engineers later and I think it’s resolve, I’m waiting on DLM at the moment to restore fastpath. This is the service I should've had from Zen. AAISP persisted and fought my corner! Thanks goes to Shaun and Stuart.

Even if the problem is still there, I'm still greatly appreciative of the efforts by AAISP to help me and after this experience I wouldn't dream of touching another ISP again. As I work from home a good internet connection is valuable to me.

As for everything else, control panel is very functional allowing me to do various things such as kill my connection, run a PSTN test (CIDT), traffic dump, change the downstream line rate percentage, MTU, etc. CQM graph is useful. Every detail about the order progress and the fault is reported on there too (e.g. engineer notes). Support and their IRC community are both friendly and helpful. Not had any buffering on iPlayer or Netflix or slow downloads unlike on my Zen connection. Yes, it's a bit expensive perhaps, but it's worth the price for sure.

I'll update this review if and when DLM returns fastpath or if anything changes in the future. I would’ve wrote more but there’s a 600 word limit, it was difficult deciding what to remove from my original review.

EDIT (09/11/17): Connection fully restored to fastpath and so far errors appear to be virtually non-existent.