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"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 al

"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.

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.