We are at the end of a longish wire on an old 20CN rural exchange. After joining Nildram some years ago, we found ourselves in the tender care of TalkTalk. And it was monumentally crap despite being on an expensive business tariff.

I read the reviews and moved to AA. It was the promised breath of fresh air too, although any hand-holding definitely needs to be requested.

Speed and stability, given the need to keep the string between the tin cans tight at all times, was a revelation and the 100% consistency showed how much TalkTalk were over selling themselves. Connection speed initially tripled, although it fell back to double both up and downstream. The subjective increase was, however, more like tenfold.

On the other hand, the pricing model for 20CN users is a disaster. For us is was pushing monthly bills ever higher - potentially over £60 / month. We don't move all that much data but we need the service during the daytime. It proved to be a great service that we could not afford to use!

We have moved to Zen and, so far, the drop in speed has been marginal, consistency has dropped a little too but the bills are going to be considerably reduced. Rather less than half the AA levels, and we are only using 25% of our allocation, meaning that we could drop to a cheaper tariff.

If AA could fix the pricing for older exchanges, maybe even offer a cut-down feature set, we would come back.