@jsamuel - I think A&A's pricing has much more to do with the need to keep performance compromise-free by buying lots of expensive bandwidth from BT, TalkTalk Wholesale and the transit providers. The reason I say this is because when you look at their tariff structure (unfortunately) they pass on per-byte costs from BT and TT straight through to the customer, as evidenced by the fact that 20CN costs twice as much as 21CN in office hours, plus comments from RevK, the boss of A&A, about what A&A have to pay out.
There are a number of free services, like static IPs that other ISPs charge you for. I simply asked for a bigger IPv4 address block and I got it, given justification for RIPE from the projected number of devices, and it was no charge and done within minutes. Unfortunately, now IPv4 space is running out / has run out completely (depending on how you look at it), they can't give out blocks of IPv4s any more and each user just gets one free static IPv4 plus huge amounts of IPv6 space (a /48 in my case !!).
But having staff who know far more about it than you do and who don't simply recite moronic crap from a script is bound to be something that costs. I used to tell myself that I didn't need customer service, which is not true unless you are incredibly lucky and never need anything changing or upgrading.
There are about a dozen IPv6 ISPs in the UK now, including a couple of the big boys who are finally getting there.