I use AA’s complete support if I get stuck with issues of configuring kit too. And that won’t go away just because DSL has. There will still be ‘how do I?’ questions, problems with the internet itself further upstream, but they will just be much less frequent, and huge problems with 3G/4G/5G won’t go away. I will still need all the monitoring capabilities because I will want to know what my own machines have been getting up to. Take last night; downloading stuff from Netflix was painfully slow, in the end I had to reboot my iPad as I think something was going crazy doing background downloads for some reason and interfering with the work which I needed to get done. I could look at the clueless.aa.net.uk graphs to see what was going on and I could do a traffic capture as well if need be, which gives me the whole story, more information than a list of flows eg TCP connections shown by the firewall/router.
AA isn’t all about the people answering the phone. Their tools and their range of services is amazing, in a different league compared with Zen; I was with Zen for a year. I can’t imagine being with anyone else - they’re just right for me and what I need. The IPv4 space = whatever you need, FOC, for example. And being able to test your own line yourself when you need to, running a BT copper line test or PSTN test.
And as for the ‘pay premium’ thing, I don’t find AA expensive. Everyone seems to think they are. Are they really any more expensive than say BT Retail? I don’t know. I pay for four copper lines + traffic costs + minor extras like email, 4G data SIMs, DNS hosting and domain registration of many domains now. An additional copper line doesn’t cost much, I forget.
Earlier posters have said AA will no longer be relevant - I see the point. However, they are smart people and they will adapt, and their own costs will go down when they don’t have the same enormous burden of support fixing so very many copper lines all the time, so that will help them, and their staff will be able to handle a higher number of customers on the books per support person. But the reasons I picked them as my ISP will not go away, my reasons were nothing to do with copper.