ISP Reviews by Steve Darnell

Some aspects of what A&A deliver are truly outstanding, some bits of the process are in my view less well executed.

We moved to A&A from Plusnet. Plusnet were almost impossible to talk to, i.e. they would eventually go through the same script and then say there was nothing wrong and our broadband was as good as it could be. We moved to A&A on a recommendation from a third party IT company.

The move to A&A was smooth and access to technical support AND the staff have been a breath of fresh air - they are great. Pick up the phones almost immediately and you speak to a specialist who is on the case with knowledge and a good degree of 'interpersonal skill'. Their ability to fix things seems to go well ahead of any of their competitors as they talk sense AND make things happen AND propose solutions where others say there is nothing that can be done.

Where is the weakness? Their sales process is I think lacking. We moved to get faster broadband on the suggestion that we could bond two lines. We got the line in first and had no appreciable speed increase. Then to their credit A&A Recommended a Firebrick to prioritize voice. This was duly shipped but came out without the appropriate router which had to follow, later it came to light that using the setup shipped knocked out the wireless access... this was eventually fixed by support re-configuring the old wireless router remotely. BUT I feel sales got it wrong at the outset by not shipping the right parts or spotting the issues / asking the right questions.

Later on when the speed was still problematic A&A suggested bonding a second line. This took a long time to be sorted and necessitated paying an additional fee to 'upgrade' the Firebrick. These bills were raised and paid for weeks and weeks before BT managed to provision the 2nd line and get it working. I suspect we were paying for something we were not receiving and clearly paid for an update way sooner than we should. The issue did not end there though...

On seeing the second box on the wall for broadband there was also no way of connecting it to the Firebrick as no-one had thought to send a second D-Link. This duly arrived and then tech support worked hard to get it sorted.

We are not quite sure if the installation is working as it should as the line keeps re-setting and we are still getting issues with voice but are not sure if it is the hardware or setup at this end or with the BT lines.