8 ms·

Move to Zen or Andrews and Arnold if you are in the UK. Larger ISPs are cancer here.

by hughrr 5y ago

azalemeth 5y ago
"My mother" is an A&A customer as she lives somewhere where FFTC is the best form of broadband you can get (and I pay the bill -- A&A are amazing and deserve all the praise they get). Where I live, my partner subscribes to Virgin Media as they're irritatingly the only ones who can provide a ~1 GBit pipe where we live. I just had a look at both of them again, and whilst Virgin offers 1.1 GBit, Zen and A&A offer ~40 MBit. I don't live in London, and as far as I know, there are no other high bandwidth fibre or cable providers in the area. Do you know why? I know Virgin has its own infrastructure, but it irritates me that BT have been forced to unbundle their services, yet the cable cartel have not.
- Angostura 5y ago
  Might be worth looking into https://communityfibre.co.uk https://communityfibre.co.uk in London - they are digging up the streets outside my house in East London at the moment. I intend to move from Virgin when they go live here. They already cover other London areas
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    +1 for communityfibre, and another +1 for hyperoptic. They're both super reliable once installed and running. I've got Hyperoptic 150Mbps in one place, and CF 1Gbps in another, both are rock solid (and symmetric upload and download).
    - kmlx 5y ago
      hyperoptic 1gbps here. been with them for 4 years now. very happy. no issues, everything is up all the time.
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    Another +1 for CF. Been maybe 2 hiccups in the 2 years we've had them. Although we're on an early adopter plan, I think, because we've got 1Gbps for nowhere near the price they're currently quoting.
  - indigomm 5y ago
    It took me over 6 months of arguing with Virgin saying I can get their service, then not, yes, no etc. until eventually they decided I can't. I'm now waiting for CF to spread into our area in West London as I've heard good things about them. I hear rumours it may be soon.
- philpem 5y ago
  I was talking to A&A about speeds when I upgraded to FTTP. The upgrade was mostly for reliability -- my FTTC line suffered badly from local interference. They currently do an 80Mbps down, 20Mbps up service on both fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP). When I asked about gigabit (which is available on the BT FTTP platform) - the answer I got gave me the impression they want to make sure their backbone network can deal with that kind of traffic before they launch anything like that. The other thing they mentioned was that the high-bandwidth services most people use (I guess Netflix and the like) have an upper limit to the data rate -- and it's nowhere near gigabit. I'm not entirely convinced that the difference between 80Mbps and gigabit would be noticeable on anything but heavily-seeded torrents (e.g. Linux ISOs) or backups being sent to providers with similarly fat pipes. It's a great marketing strapline though, and clearly many customers see the headline "up to a gigabit, only from XYZCo!" and decide based on that.
  - minimaul 5y ago
    It does make a difference if you have anyone in your house doing gaming (games are HUGE now), and it makes a big difference for me on work from home. Especially the difference between A&A’s fastest 160/30 service and Openreach’s 1000/115 - the extra upload is more important than the extra download for me! edit: A&A’s issue with gigabit at the moment is caused by one of their strengths - A&A make firebrick routers, which are what they run their broadband platform on. It gives them more control and great monitoring. But the higher bandwidth versions aren’t ready yet, so they can’t really sell faster services yet.
    - blibble 5y ago
      > It does make a difference if you have anyone in your house doing gaming (games are HUGE now), and it makes a big difference for me on work from home. does it? just checked my router, my WFH VLAN has consumed 21gb down/7.7gb up in the last 64 days so 2xmonitor fullscreen citrix is using about 300mb down/120mb up per day and my gaming VLAN used about 20kb/s when playing Overwatch I doubt you will notice any difference between 160/30 fibre and 1000/115 fibre!
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > A&A are amazing They really are. Their phones are picked up almost immediately. The person you get to speak to is technically competent. E.g. if you call sales, you often get the head of sales. A&A target geeks; they provide an IRC channel that is populated with knowledgeable geeks (as well as A&A support people). This is my first port of call for technical issues, because I prefer not to burden their support people if that's avoidable. Also because I think an IRC chat is an easier way of dealing with a technical issue than a phone-call, on the whole.
dpwm 5y ago
Can second A&A. Used them for a business FTTC line and was very impressed.
maxehmookau 5y ago
I don't think that's entirely fair. I've been a happy Virgin Media customer for well over a decade. I've never had a serious outage and get 350mb internet (which I actually get), a decent selection of TV channels and use of a landline for £50/month. They're subject to the same bullshit as other ISPs, but you can mostly opt-out.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Virgin are the worst provider there is. Literally I’m typing this now because two of the people I’m on a zoom call with bailed because their virgin connection crapped out.
  - jonatron 5y ago
    The guy I was on a call with just had to switch to tethering, he's on Virgin.
  - minimaul 5y ago
    The only ISPs we’ve had persistent VPN problems with for Work from Home for my work have been Virgin and TalkTalk, and TalkTalk was solved with a newer router. VM don’t even admit it’s their issue.
    - ks6g10 5y ago
      Let the people with virgin use a custom dns, like cloudflare or google, have solved many issues I had whilst under virgin.
  - DrBazza 5y ago
    Anecdatum: on virgin and it’s been rock solid for the last 2 years. Must be a location thing.
    - petepete 5y ago
      Same for me but for a decade. Only ever had one outage that lasted more than a couple of hours. No complaints.
bshimmin 5y ago
It's funny how this advice - to use either Zen or A&A if you conceivably can - hasn't really changed for about twenty years. (I used A&A in London a decade ago and they were great, albeit a bit expensive.)
- twic 5y ago
  Twenty years ago, i think Demon would have been on the approved list too.
  - bshimmin 5y ago
    I was also a happy Demon user for some years from the mid-nineties... having your own hostname and IP address (which, weirdly, I can still remember) always felt so luxurious!
minimaul 5y ago
Andrews and Arnold or IDNET for me. I have a gigabit FTTP service from IDNET (over Openreach FTTP) and it has been very reliable. edit: it’d be on A&A if they did 1000/115 as an option. I’d avoid pretty much all of the standard retail ISPs, and especially Virgin Media. VM are very aware they are not part of the normal migration setup for UK broadband, and exploit it to the hilt. Their support sucks, and cancellation is downright abusive.
- 00deadbeef 5y ago
  Virgin is the only option for me. I can get 20Mbps VDSL from an OpenReach user like AAISP or 1Gbps from Virgin. Pretty easy choice.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    I would take the VDSL
    - 00deadbeef 5y ago
      You must not have much need to upload. I’d struggle with “up to” 3Mbps. I also wouldn’t enjoy downloading a 60GB from Steam with that download speed either.
      - hughrr 5y ago
        I downloaded GTA V on 20Mbit. I’ve now got 5 people on 66Mbit.
        00deadbeef 5y ago
        GTA isn't even that big. MW is 231GB. That would tie up a 20Mbps connection for over 24 hours, which to me is unacceptable when I both work from home and run my own business. The biggest problem, as I said, though, is upload. 3Mbps is basically useless when I need to run off-site backups, videoconference, push files to servers, etc. > I’ve now got 5 people on 66Mbit. That's nice for you but that's about 13Mbps each which isn't much less than 20Mbps and they're unlikely to all be using it heavily at the same time, so in reality they probably get more than 20Mbps each. And as I said, my choice is 20Mbps vs 1Gbps. No 66Mbps option. It's not really a choice at all.
Nullabillity 5y ago
Don't A&A do bandwidth quotas? Their bandwidth limitations also look really pathetic (asymmetric FTTP, is this a bad joke?).
- minimaul 5y ago
  They do, but they’re sufficiently high you really shouldn’t hit them unless your traffic pattern is very extreme (the main home option is 5TB/month). Asymmetric FTTP is because they’re using Openreach’s FTTP platform (like most other ISPs in the UK), and Openreach FTTP is asymmetric. The fact they don’t offer faster speeds is currently a limitation of their broadband platform (they use in house developed routers), but they’re working on it.
  - dijksterhuis 5y ago
    There's also the quota bonus to be aware of > half of the unused quota from the previous month being added to the next. https://support.aa.net.uk/Home::1 https://support.aa.net.uk/Home::1 I currently have 8.7TB left on my quota this month.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    Some people download tremendous amounts of stuff they don't need. This lifestyle is incompatible with A&A quotas (at your big name ISP it's actually costing them more than you pay for the service, but they have so many customers they don't care unless it gets entirely out of hand). Hear a passing mention that "Bob's Cheese Factory" is good on the podcast you listen to in the shower. Find out there were six seasons, OK, download six seasons of the Bob's Cheese Factory show, equating to 60 hours of video. That evening, watch the first twenty minutes of the pilot, seems kinda flat, delete all sixty hours. Similar behaviours exist in many aspects of life, there are people who own hundreds of items of clothing they'll never wear, for video games we know an on-line only title will see a staggering number of purchasers who never even go on-line with it once, meaning they paid for it, but they have never played even a few minutes of it, many of us order far more than one reasonable meal per person for take out food.
    - 5y ago
mike-cardwell 5y ago
I've just moved house and I'm waiting for A&A to connect me up. I've had some issues because BT Wholesale and Openreach disagree on whether or not I can have FTTC. (I can, the previous owners had it). I've had excellent support so far. It's a breath of fresh air to be able to go to a website, see an email address on it, fire off an email to them, and get a very fast response. None of these god awful web forms whos entire purpose is to try to stop you from actually speaking to a human being. I've also logged on to IRC and got some help there too.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  One memorable time I was chatting to A&A on IRC whilst giving my mother mother-friendly translations and more detailed instructions over the phone. Excellent support, better than I've had professionally. The best part is that if you have a physical problem with the line they pester BT Openreach full time to fix it. Like, the job that you usually do trying to get an ISP to fix a problem. They write very detailed, technical emails to BT internally and copy you in. In my (mother's) case the issue was with someone plugging something in the wrong way around in the exchange. Yes, they're more expensive, but you really do get what you pay for.
dr-detroit 5y ago
the big boys stole public made infrastructure in the USA so it could be worse...
Quarrel 5y ago
If you're in London at least, Hyperoptic & G.Network. Literally don't even filter any of the sites on the high court orders. (I assume because they apply to specific corporations and they fly under the radar for now)
jonathantf2 5y ago
I've got Gigaclear internet - they don't block any of the sites that the high court demand big ISPs do and don't seem to send threatening DMCA letters either. We pay £50pm for symmetrical gigabit and it's great.
- tboughen 5y ago
  I’d love to use Gigaclear since they recently became available in my area. I booked installation twice - no one came either time, and when I contacted Gigaclear I heard nothing.
jen20 5y ago
I'll add a +1 for Aquiss also - the last time I lived in the UK they were wonderful to deal with in every respect - the absolute antithesis of any of the "mainstream" ISPs in the UK (or the US).
cutthegrass2 5y ago
+1 for Andrews & Arnold, very happy customer here.
gnufx 5y ago
Note that A&A are most tastefully accessed via http://sod.ms http://sod.ms
ryanlol 5y ago
Hyperoptic is great if you have coverage.

Move to Zen or Andrews and Arnold if you are in the UK. Larger ISPs are cancer here.

by hughrr 5y ago

Move to Zen or Andrews and Arnold if you are in the UK. Larger ISPs are cancer here.

"My mother" is an A&A customer as she lives somewhere where FFTC is the best form of broadband you can get (and I pay the bill -- A&A are amazing and deserve all the praise they get). Where I live, my partner subscribes to Virgin Media as they're irritatingly the only ones who can provide a ~1 GBit pipe where we live. I just had a look at both of them again, and whilst Virgin offers 1.1 GBit, Zen and A&A offer ~40 MBit. I don't live in London, and as far as I know, there are no other high bandwidth fibre or cable providers in the area. Do you know why? I know Virgin has its own infrastructure, but it irritates me that BT have been forced to unbundle their services, yet the cable cartel have not.

Angostura 5y ago
Might be worth looking into https://communityfibre.co.uk https://communityfibre.co.uk in London - they are digging up the streets outside my house in East London at the moment. I intend to move from Virgin when they go live here. They already cover other London areas
- oarsinsync 5y ago
  +1 for communityfibre, and another +1 for hyperoptic. They're both super reliable once installed and running. I've got Hyperoptic 150Mbps in one place, and CF 1Gbps in another, both are rock solid (and symmetric upload and download).
  - kmlx 5y ago
    hyperoptic 1gbps here. been with them for 4 years now. very happy. no issues, everything is up all the time.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  Another +1 for CF. Been maybe 2 hiccups in the 2 years we've had them. Although we're on an early adopter plan, I think, because we've got 1Gbps for nowhere near the price they're currently quoting.
- indigomm 5y ago
  It took me over 6 months of arguing with Virgin saying I can get their service, then not, yes, no etc. until eventually they decided I can't. I'm now waiting for CF to spread into our area in West London as I've heard good things about them. I hear rumours it may be soon.
philpem 5y ago
I was talking to A&A about speeds when I upgraded to FTTP. The upgrade was mostly for reliability -- my FTTC line suffered badly from local interference. They currently do an 80Mbps down, 20Mbps up service on both fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP). When I asked about gigabit (which is available on the BT FTTP platform) - the answer I got gave me the impression they want to make sure their backbone network can deal with that kind of traffic before they launch anything like that. The other thing they mentioned was that the high-bandwidth services most people use (I guess Netflix and the like) have an upper limit to the data rate -- and it's nowhere near gigabit. I'm not entirely convinced that the difference between 80Mbps and gigabit would be noticeable on anything but heavily-seeded torrents (e.g. Linux ISOs) or backups being sent to providers with similarly fat pipes. It's a great marketing strapline though, and clearly many customers see the headline "up to a gigabit, only from XYZCo!" and decide based on that.
- minimaul 5y ago
  It does make a difference if you have anyone in your house doing gaming (games are HUGE now), and it makes a big difference for me on work from home. Especially the difference between A&A’s fastest 160/30 service and Openreach’s 1000/115 - the extra upload is more important than the extra download for me! edit: A&A’s issue with gigabit at the moment is caused by one of their strengths - A&A make firebrick routers, which are what they run their broadband platform on. It gives them more control and great monitoring. But the higher bandwidth versions aren’t ready yet, so they can’t really sell faster services yet.
  - blibble 5y ago
    > It does make a difference if you have anyone in your house doing gaming (games are HUGE now), and it makes a big difference for me on work from home. does it? just checked my router, my WFH VLAN has consumed 21gb down/7.7gb up in the last 64 days so 2xmonitor fullscreen citrix is using about 300mb down/120mb up per day and my gaming VLAN used about 20kb/s when playing Overwatch I doubt you will notice any difference between 160/30 fibre and 1000/115 fibre!
denton-scratch 5y ago
> A&A are amazing They really are. Their phones are picked up almost immediately. The person you get to speak to is technically competent. E.g. if you call sales, you often get the head of sales. A&A target geeks; they provide an IRC channel that is populated with knowledgeable geeks (as well as A&A support people). This is my first port of call for technical issues, because I prefer not to burden their support people if that's avoidable. Also because I think an IRC chat is an easier way of dealing with a technical issue than a phone-call, on the whole.

dpwm 5y ago

Can second A&A. Used them for a business FTTC line and was very impressed.

maxehmookau 5y ago

I don't think that's entirely fair. I've been a happy Virgin Media customer for well over a decade. I've never had a serious outage and get 350mb internet (which I actually get), a decent selection of TV channels and use of a landline for £50/month. They're subject to the same bullshit as other ISPs, but you can mostly opt-out.

hughrr 5y ago
Virgin are the worst provider there is. Literally I’m typing this now because two of the people I’m on a zoom call with bailed because their virgin connection crapped out.
- jonatron 5y ago
  The guy I was on a call with just had to switch to tethering, he's on Virgin.
- minimaul 5y ago
  The only ISPs we’ve had persistent VPN problems with for Work from Home for my work have been Virgin and TalkTalk, and TalkTalk was solved with a newer router. VM don’t even admit it’s their issue.
  - ks6g10 5y ago
    Let the people with virgin use a custom dns, like cloudflare or google, have solved many issues I had whilst under virgin.
- DrBazza 5y ago
  Anecdatum: on virgin and it’s been rock solid for the last 2 years. Must be a location thing.
  - petepete 5y ago
    Same for me but for a decade. Only ever had one outage that lasted more than a couple of hours. No complaints.

bshimmin 5y ago

It's funny how this advice - to use either Zen or A&A if you conceivably can - hasn't really changed for about twenty years. (I used A&A in London a decade ago and they were great, albeit a bit expensive.)

twic 5y ago
Twenty years ago, i think Demon would have been on the approved list too.
- bshimmin 5y ago
  I was also a happy Demon user for some years from the mid-nineties... having your own hostname and IP address (which, weirdly, I can still remember) always felt so luxurious!

minimaul 5y ago

Andrews and Arnold or IDNET for me. I have a gigabit FTTP service from IDNET (over Openreach FTTP) and it has been very reliable. edit: it’d be on A&A if they did 1000/115 as an option. I’d avoid pretty much all of the standard retail ISPs, and especially Virgin Media. VM are very aware they are not part of the normal migration setup for UK broadband, and exploit it to the hilt. Their support sucks, and cancellation is downright abusive.

00deadbeef 5y ago
Virgin is the only option for me. I can get 20Mbps VDSL from an OpenReach user like AAISP or 1Gbps from Virgin. Pretty easy choice.
- hughrr 5y ago
  I would take the VDSL
  - 00deadbeef 5y ago
    You must not have much need to upload. I’d struggle with “up to” 3Mbps. I also wouldn’t enjoy downloading a 60GB from Steam with that download speed either.
    - hughrr 5y ago
      I downloaded GTA V on 20Mbit. I’ve now got 5 people on 66Mbit.
      - 00deadbeef 5y ago
        GTA isn't even that big. MW is 231GB. That would tie up a 20Mbps connection for over 24 hours, which to me is unacceptable when I both work from home and run my own business. The biggest problem, as I said, though, is upload. 3Mbps is basically useless when I need to run off-site backups, videoconference, push files to servers, etc. > I’ve now got 5 people on 66Mbit. That's nice for you but that's about 13Mbps each which isn't much less than 20Mbps and they're unlikely to all be using it heavily at the same time, so in reality they probably get more than 20Mbps each. And as I said, my choice is 20Mbps vs 1Gbps. No 66Mbps option. It's not really a choice at all.

Nullabillity 5y ago

Don't A&A do bandwidth quotas? Their bandwidth limitations also look really pathetic (asymmetric FTTP, is this a bad joke?).

minimaul 5y ago
They do, but they’re sufficiently high you really shouldn’t hit them unless your traffic pattern is very extreme (the main home option is 5TB/month). Asymmetric FTTP is because they’re using Openreach’s FTTP platform (like most other ISPs in the UK), and Openreach FTTP is asymmetric. The fact they don’t offer faster speeds is currently a limitation of their broadband platform (they use in house developed routers), but they’re working on it.
- dijksterhuis 5y ago
  There's also the quota bonus to be aware of > half of the unused quota from the previous month being added to the next. https://support.aa.net.uk/Home::1 https://support.aa.net.uk/Home::1 I currently have 8.7TB left on my quota this month.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  Some people download tremendous amounts of stuff they don't need. This lifestyle is incompatible with A&A quotas (at your big name ISP it's actually costing them more than you pay for the service, but they have so many customers they don't care unless it gets entirely out of hand). Hear a passing mention that "Bob's Cheese Factory" is good on the podcast you listen to in the shower. Find out there were six seasons, OK, download six seasons of the Bob's Cheese Factory show, equating to 60 hours of video. That evening, watch the first twenty minutes of the pilot, seems kinda flat, delete all sixty hours. Similar behaviours exist in many aspects of life, there are people who own hundreds of items of clothing they'll never wear, for video games we know an on-line only title will see a staggering number of purchasers who never even go on-line with it once, meaning they paid for it, but they have never played even a few minutes of it, many of us order far more than one reasonable meal per person for take out food.
  - 5y ago

mike-cardwell 5y ago

I've just moved house and I'm waiting for A&A to connect me up. I've had some issues because BT Wholesale and Openreach disagree on whether or not I can have FTTC. (I can, the previous owners had it). I've had excellent support so far. It's a breath of fresh air to be able to go to a website, see an email address on it, fire off an email to them, and get a very fast response. None of these god awful web forms whos entire purpose is to try to stop you from actually speaking to a human being. I've also logged on to IRC and got some help there too.

azalemeth 5y ago
One memorable time I was chatting to A&A on IRC whilst giving my mother mother-friendly translations and more detailed instructions over the phone. Excellent support, better than I've had professionally. The best part is that if you have a physical problem with the line they pester BT Openreach full time to fix it. Like, the job that you usually do trying to get an ISP to fix a problem. They write very detailed, technical emails to BT internally and copy you in. In my (mother's) case the issue was with someone plugging something in the wrong way around in the exchange. Yes, they're more expensive, but you really do get what you pay for.

dr-detroit 5y ago

the big boys stole public made infrastructure in the USA so it could be worse...

Quarrel 5y ago

If you're in London at least, Hyperoptic & G.Network. Literally don't even filter any of the sites on the high court orders. (I assume because they apply to specific corporations and they fly under the radar for now)

jonathantf2 5y ago

I've got Gigaclear internet - they don't block any of the sites that the high court demand big ISPs do and don't seem to send threatening DMCA letters either. We pay £50pm for symmetrical gigabit and it's great.

tboughen 5y ago
I’d love to use Gigaclear since they recently became available in my area. I booked installation twice - no one came either time, and when I contacted Gigaclear I heard nothing.

jen20 5y ago

I'll add a +1 for Aquiss also - the last time I lived in the UK they were wonderful to deal with in every respect - the absolute antithesis of any of the "mainstream" ISPs in the UK (or the US).

cutthegrass2 5y ago

+1 for Andrews & Arnold, very happy customer here.

gnufx 5y ago

Note that A&A are most tastefully accessed via http://sod.ms http://sod.ms

ryanlol 5y ago

Hyperoptic is great if you have coverage.