Comparing the price of AAISP vs BT Retail is a bit nonsensical in my opinion.
- Do BT Retail generally have a similar high quality customer support experience compared to AAISP, when it's needed?
Once on FTTP, how often will you need customer support?
AAISP are excellent at pushing Openreach to fix problems other ISP's can't be bothered with, but this should completely go away once the copper network does.
- Do BT Retail offer 12 month or 1 month contracts for FTTC or FTTP?
AAISP surely are tied to whatever BT Wholesale allow and why are we focusing purely on BT Retail here?
- Do BT Retail offer static IPv4 address(es)?
BT Retail is not the only option, there will be many other ISPs to choose from.
- Do BT Retail have a similar set of options to choose from in their user control panel?
As I've never been an AAISP customer then I haven't a clue what their control panel is like.
- Do BT Retail have somewhat detailed graphs indicating the state of the connection?
Does anyone really need this on FTTP? This can equally be documented from the customers side with the right hardware.
- Do BT Retail have something like an IRC channel where others can potentially ping members of staff day or night (as long as they are around)?
But again this is support that shouldn't be needed if the equipment "just works". You're paying a premium for this so unless in a very unique situation like Weaver, I don't see it as good value. My argument isn't that their service isn't good for some people, its is it sustainable to run a business on that once less technical support is required because FTTP is more reliable and the number of customers that need that level of support could fall dramatically.
- Does BT Retail not potentially traffic shape at peak times if they happen to experience congestion in some part of their network? In other words do they have no potential traffic shaping policy in place these days (been a long time since I was on BT so I might be wrong about this point)?
Again I'm not quite sure why were only focusing on BT Retail here.
- Do BT Retail support bonding like AAISP offers?
Why would you need bonding on FTTP? The most likely point of failure with fibre is a fibre break, I can't imagine a situation where that would happen and only take down one of your lines. Perhaps ONT failure.
I actually wanted to use AAISP to bond my two lines as I'd read they sell that as a service but could never find it on their site. Now I've been using plain load balancing, I'm not sure I see any value in paying more to bond the lines as the ONLY reason to do that for me is to combine the speed, but as AAISP charge a fortune for bandwidth it negates the whole point.