ISP Reviews by MaxNRG

The adage goes that you can have two out of three when presented with the choice of Good, Fast and Cheap. So lets deal with the elephant in the room as regards A&A... if I had to choose only one ISP to support a heavy diet of Netflix, Sky On Demand, BBC iPlayer and the myriad of other ways to burn through a bandwidth allowance then Andrews & Arnold would not be my first choice. There I've said it and it is the truth, they unashamedly state on their website...

"The second reason, which mainly makes sense with our terabyte services, is to have a high limit but one that deters the really heavy users, i.e. the people that literally use hundreds of times the typical usage. By excluding such customers from these services we can provide a faster and better services to our customers."

So if you need an all you can eat (read cheap) service that has varying levels of goodness and speed or you always use more than 2TB/month or £50/month + line rental seems way to expensive for the aforementioned 2TB then this service isn't for you.

Now my need for VDSL on a 2nd line is very different to my main unlimited connection with Sky Fibre. This 2nd line needs to be faultless and super fast for home working where my bandwidth requirement is not very high. Uses like this are where speed and reliability trump cost. And it is in this area that A&A is peerless among the myriad of consumer ISPs out there.

My scenario is particularly interesting as I transferred a poor lying performing line that had constant drop outs when I was running regular ASDL to A&A after my line was upgraded to super fast 80/20 VDSL. A&A (through the very efficient support team members of Stuart and David) identified through their first class line monitoring that my frequently dropping connection was most likely an actual fault. After previous experience with other big ISPs this was an immediate breath of fresh air. I work in a technical technology job and had given up on ever talking to a real support person at an ISP. And so before I could even think about it I had an engineer visit and replace some wiring in my PCP, transforming my line into one that is rock solid and giving me my maximum bandwidth with minuscule latency 24/7.

In addition to the support staff and the service overall, the web based account and connection admistration tools remind me of enterprise level network tooling. The fact that I get a message when my connection goes down for any reason is brilliant. All of these goodness has a cost that I'm more than willing to pay and you may also think is worth it.