Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) Reviews

I switched to AAISP from PlusNet/JohnLewis who made a complete pigs ear of the process, while AAISP were impeccable.

The big draw was not having to have the 'BT tax' and allowed us to drop the landline and all the spam calls we were getting.

The price for 200GB fibre is a few pounds more than the competition (£45 all in with line rental), but the superb service and technical knowledge easily make this worthwhile.

They've also recently added a 'rollover' policy where half the unused quota carries over to the next month, which sealed the deal for me, and prompted the change.

I switched to AA after many years with PlusNet. The day I switched, BT decide to upgrade my local exchange to ADSL2+. It took me about a week to realise that it wasn't the switch to AA that gave me a much needed speed boost but the highly coincidental exchange upgrade.

No problems with AA so far. I like the dashboard controls and the ability to monitor usage and line performance - very nice features.

My only gripe is that in an Apple dominated household with iCloud, Photos, iTunes, iPhones, etc, the basic 100GB limit is NOT enough. I'd be happy paying £25pm for a more reasonable 200GB. I would urge AA to seriously consider increasing this, otherwise I may have to switch back to (the now much faster) unlimited PlusNet after my minimum contract period expires.
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Two years later....and after a house move, back with AA again and now on FTTC with a slightly better 150GB monthly limit. The overall value proposition is much better if you take AA's VOIP service taking call costs and line rental into account. Therefore I have increased the value rating from 5 to 9. VOIP is excellent and AA's customer service is as outstanding as ever.
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Now with a new rolling carry-over scheme of ½ of your unused bandwidth. AAISP continues to get better and better.

It has been said before but I will say it again. With A&A you get what you pay for.

The speed is excellent. The reliability is superb. Support is near perfect. Sure their is no 24 hour phone support but out of hours I got help on IRC, which I only had to use once just after signing up.

Support are UK based and know what they are doing.

I love the static IP address and the fact A&A don't prohibit running home based servers. In my case email and Nextcloud.

The control panel is great. Visibility of your service I doubt you would get anywhere else.

I am on the 1TB package which is plenty for me even with the wife consuming a lot of on demand video.

The bill is more than the rivals but it is worth it for sure.

Would I recommend A&A to others? Yes I would.

I have only been with Andrews and Arnold for a month, after a torrid time at BT. Since ordering from them everything has been absolutely top rate. Extremely helpful and friendly staff, who speak English with an English accent that I can understand. Everything was done promptly and efficiently, and the broadband has worked without a hitch since. Highly recommended.

I use AAISP at two properties, and find them impeccable. Moved from another tech-orientated UK ISP several years ago for the ipv6 access.

Like most UK ISPs, A&A provide services over BT's backhaul network. Expected line speeds are therefore in line with other UK ISP estimates. However do not be deceived - what counts more is the core ISP-run network your packets traverse once they get through the DSL circuit. Here A&A shine. Experience with other ISPs is that latency can vary depending on time of day/day of week, both through ISP applied QOS, and contention in their own backbone networks. Not so with A&A, speeds and latencies remain largely consistent at all times.

Things I like:

- ipv6 access
- fabulous visibility of bandwidth consumption etc. through web interface
- access to ppp logs
- responsive and capable support
- Shibboleet compliance

All in all, bravo!

I've been using them since September and I'm very happy with the service so far, and I choose them mostly because I know they are a serious provider.

I use internet mostly for Netflix, work and playing League of Legends and I was very surprised to see low latency.

I was a bit worried about the limited bandwidth in the beginning but that end up not being an issue and they also recently released a new feature where you carry half of the unused bandwidth to the next month, which is great if you have a month where you are travelling more and then a month where you are watching more Netflix at home ;)

Interesting story: they accidentally moved my original installation date due to a communication mistake, then I called and told them I wasn't happy about this, they apologised and offered me the router for free (-£25) and did their best to book the installation as soon as possible with Openreach.

Yes you pay more than a normal connection but you get an excellent service and great support if something goes wrong (never happened actually)

I've used a&a for many years, and they've never let me down.

I moved into a new place 6 months ago and decided to use a&a for my company. I use the Soho::1 2TiB service.

I started off with 65Mbps with 20ms latency... over time they made improvements and now I get 75Mbps with 10ms latency.

I asked for a /28 IPv4 address subnet after hours and got it within minutes. Same for setting rDNS on some IPs.

As of 1 October 2017, my maximum quota has also been doubled to 4TiB in a month; whatever I don't use is halved and added onto 2TiB next month. It's cumulative, and adds up to a maximum of 4TiB quota. They also did something similar on the Home::1 service. See:
http://www.aa.net.uk/news-2017-tariffs.html

Of course, as always, this quota only applies to downloading. Uploading is *unmetered*. You can upload as much as you want on a&a, so it's perfect for servers. I personally run several web/mail servers and other services on my a&a line.

Nothing beats AAISP.

I even get a text message alert when my line goes down. That rarely happens, though, and it's usually only for a few minutes.

I run my own GNU+Linux based router on my line, so that I can more easily set up a customized network. My LAN consists of public IPs, without a NAT. a&a provided me with the IPs that I needed for this!

My service is also uncensored so I can access whatever sites I want, and this ISP is dedicated to freedom. This includes resistance to spying. For instance, they use FireBrick routers in their datacenter. While these are proprietary (and I wouldn't recommend them to the public), a&a has the source code for them since the director of the company also runs the FireBrick company so unlike most ISPs, a&a also has more autonomy over their own network.
(of course, for anyone using a&a I would recommend using a GNU+Linux based router, or OpenBSD/FreeBSD)

Unlike most ISPs, a&a is not against running servers or custom routers.

But you want to know what REALLY makes a&a amazing?

IRC BASED TECHNICAL SUPPORT!
And PGP signed invoices sent via email every month.

a&a is pricy, don't get me wrong, but the service is TOP NOTCH. It simply cannot be beaten on quality. And honestly, it's not that expensive. It's worth every penny :)

If you're a home user and you don't need more than a single IPv4 address (a&a also provides IPv6 subnets by default), then you could use the cheaper Home::1 1TiB service. Personally though, I recommend the Soho::1 2TiB service, since on that one you can get IPv4 subnets.

I opened an account with Andrews & Arnold when my previous ISP Fast.co suddenly ceased to provide a broadband service. They signed me up without delay and provided an immediate broadband connection. Their charges were not substantially more than my previous service. Since then I've had no problems with the broadband service.

More recently I decided to buy a VoIP 'phone service from A&A, again because my existing service from New Call came to an end and I was arbitrarily switched to PO Telecoms who insisted on a fixed contract period at a higher price. As a complete innocent in electronic equipment and connections I received a lot of assistance in setting up VoIP which is now installed and working entirely to my satisfaction.

All my contacts with A&A staff have been swiftly made and very helpful.

Andrews & Arnold ask customers to review them on this site.

On services:

Unlike my previous ISP, which would bundle a lot of unwanted features like online storage, antivirus, an e-mail account, and so forth, Andrews & Arnold's broadband is just that: broadband. I think that's a good thing.

Although "just broadband", it's fully functional: static addresses, no filtering, and quite configurable. The control panel works very well, providing a wealth of features that other providers wouldn't trust their customers with, such as overriding the negotiated MTU, clamping MSS, resetting the line from their side, or delegating RDNS.

The most impressive feature is the Constant Quality Monitoring, which provides near real-time graphs of bandwidth use, latency, packet loss, loss of carrier, and so forth. There are also settings for alerts for service outages or planned engineering work.


On support:

AAISP have a reputation for impeccable technical support. However, it is officially during "office hours" only (plus Saturday morning). This is understandable for a small company, but it makes things harder for home users.

I've had mixed results from my interactions. When a purchase failed because one part of their system doesn't understand their own two-factor authentication mechanism, I was first told "It should work". After another email and once the scenario had been confirmed by others, I got back "I'll look into it", but I had to email a follow up a day later to ask for my purchase to be put through manually.

Likewise, attracting staff attention on IRC can be a hit-or-miss affair, but the community there is often helpful.

My line has been reliable and any network issues have been beyond A&A's control, but other aspects of the A&A service have been less so. For example, my VoIP phone has re-registered four times in the past two days, and people on IRC were reporting missed calls yesterday.


On speed:

For VDSL connections, the sync speed is out of the ISP's hands. I've not found AAISP to be the bottleneck, but I was always able to max my line out on BT as well.

My latency over the TalkTalk backhaul is worse than it was with BT. AAISP say they have no control over this.


On value:

I like that AAISP don't provide a "free" modem or bundle anything extra: ultimately, such packages just mean charging people for things they don't want. In general, the pricing structure on AAISP is simple and honest. If you need a router, they'll supply one for £25.

I was hesitant to move to AAISP due to the 1TB data cap, but after monitoring my usage for a month beforehand, I found I only average 8 to 10GB per day, so didn't need the "unlimited" broadband offered by other providers. Andrews & Arnold have recently changed their Home::1 tariffs to allow carrying half of the remaining allowance into the next month, which is a very fair change that would mean an occasional heavy period isn't a problem.

Having said this, the price isn't cheap in comparison to other pure broadband packages.

A&A are content to provide a broadband-only phone line for £10, which is is recommended so that there's one point-of-contact for faults and cheaper than BT line rental. But rather than charge something for nothing, perhaps it would be nice if they offered free migration to VoIP for those who want it, instead of for an additional £1.20?

I've just transferred to AAISP, and everything went flawlessly, with useful informative messages throughout. The only query was instantly responded to there and then on the phone.

So far, no problems with the line or setup.

Any issues with speed will be due to the line from me to the cabinet, not AAISP.

Not the cheapest, but provides features I would like and are keeping up to date (eg. IPv6 support out of the box).