ISP Reviews by zanywells

I had an ADSL line with Zen for a short time and found the network to be exceptionally good. However, I am not sure why Zen's customer service is so highly rated as my experiences were that they can be a bit slow to reply to questions, and in my case they didn't spend the effort to answer my question about ADSL to FTTC upgrades (which another ISP was willing to investigate with Openreach, so got my business). Overall, very good in the important area of having a quality network - and IPV6 too!

Great attitude

A&A's staff are competent and clearly enthusiastic about every detail of their network, and often put things in a light-hearted or overtly geeky way (a nod, I would say, to the kind of people who have naturally gravitated towards their services). They're honest about what things cost, plain-speaking when there's a fault, and infallible in solving the sort of questions that big label consumer ISPs wouldn't grasp. These are qualities I have come to really appreciate.

Highly configurable

A&A is a power user's ISP. For example, you probably wouldn't want an inexperienced user toying with the control panel (known as 'Clueless'), as it gives you access to carrier controls over your line, such as noise margins, IPV6 subnets and the like. It's perfectly simple to ignore these, and with the supplied router you'll actually have no mandatory configuration to do (even for IPV6) but if you decide to dive in, every last detail is open for tinkering.

Fast

Low latency, no contention, and A&A are always looking for ways to get you onto the best service for your exchange. For example, when I signed up I was on an old BT '20C' exchange, and very shortly after moving to A&A I was invited to move (free) to TalkTalk's 21C service. My line speed tripled! I recently moved to the 80Mb FTTC service, and A&A made the switch over without any downtime at all.

If you *are* keen to have full control over your broadband, and you'd like no-compromise, uncontended bandwidth right to the limits of your exchange, it's A&A time! Simply the best you can get.

Price is worth it

With the Home::1 package the premium in price is far less than the huge gains you'll get in terms of stability, low latency, lack of contention and general goodwill from the team. Other ISPs might offer you the same sort of connectivity, but their network will almost certainly not be as carefully curated as Andrews and Arnold's.