Broadband Related > ISPs
Trialling Andrews and Arnold (AAISP)
Weaver:
I'm going to evaluate Andrews and Arnold ('AAISP') for a decent period on one of my lines. ( http://aaisp.net.uk/ )
I'm moving one line from Demon 's Business 2000 (=BT Wholesale IPStream Max Premium) to AAISP today hopefully. That line is horrendously long and although very very clean and stable generally a 62dB attenuation means that there's only so much it will do. I've ordered AAISP's service with the option of BT Wholesale IPStream Max _Premium_ (again, as before with Demon) meaning (i) the potential for faster outbound ('upstream') service (which won't be achieveable/sustainable in practice given the length of the line) and (ii) BTW traffic priority at peak times, supposedly.
Last year I also trialled Zen for about 9 months at a different site, unfortunately on a really good (=short) line, so not much of a challenge.
I'll compare AAISP's service with Demon Business 8000 (which is still up on a different line and will remain so) and Zen and - so a three-way contest - and will report back if anyone's interested.
Weaver:
Switched over to AAISP this afternoon.
Luurrverly.
Inbound real TCP payload throughput is much healthier this afternoon at well over 1.9kb/s (typically 1.96Mb/s say) and this is during peak hours, and that's near enough up to the limit imposed by the current BTW IP Profile 'rung' of 2000 currently in effect, especially remembering that I presumably need to also allow for TCP's overheads to be deducted from that figure of 2000. Latency / ping times to the nearest hop are down to 45ms (-ish) which I would think is about where they should be for a line with interleave.
Comparing these numbers with Demon, from spot measurements at various times during the last two week, real-world TCP inbound throughput ranged from 1.53Mb/s at midday on one day, to 1.71Mb/s on another day, again at midday and only up to 1.87Mb/s very late at night. The ping-to-nearest-hop times were consistently worse with Demon, more often than not from 65ms or above rather than in the 40s, and at times they had been as high as 100ms and last Autumn even more like 150ms at one point.
Not that its anything to do with AAISP or Demon, but the faithful Netgear DG834v3 (with various h/w pamperings) was purring away at a sync rate of 2464 with 5.5-6dB SNR margin and the usual 62dB attn. So well above the sync rate for IP profile 2000 but not close to that for 2500 unfortunately.
Concerning the accuracy of these TCP test figures, I also think there is a likelihood that there is a danger that these figures are on the low side as I used PlusNet's Flash-based speed tester (among others) all of which are outside the AAISP's network so congestion could play a factor. I should have used the BT Wholesale speed test for a more accurate result, but the BTW tool now wants strange magic runes of power to be entered into it before you can use it, and these I don't have at hand. I have compared several of the popular UK-based test servers against one another from time to time and find them broadly in agreement, so it doesn't seem that the PlusNet one is especially stressed or congested though.
AAISP - a really, really good start - good first impression anyway.
Weaver:
A couple of weeks in, and AAISP is still going strong. Just blindingly fast.
Until I had a bit of bad luck again last night. Trying to fiddle with a new Juniper Netscreen SSG-20, I managed to upset BT Wholesale, whose 20CN BRAS knocked my IP Profile down from 2000 to 1750 despite sync being restored later to be way at 2496 well above the threshold for IP profile 2000 according to Kitz' excellent table at http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/IPprofile.htm .
I asked AAISP staff (via their web chat IRC service) if they would kick BTW for me and shove the BRAS IP profile back to where it should be. AAISP staff warned me that they believe it takes 60+ hours to float back up again, which fits in with my recent experience, and gave me the impression that they would sort it.
I got the feeling that this meant talking to a human at BTW. Is this kind of thing capable of being automated, anyone know?
Unfortunately they haven't yet fixed it as far as I can see, which is disappointing.
AAISP's website shows a kind of marked 'blob' thing in a graphical history of the state of the DSL line, and says explicitly mm:hh BRAS changed to xxxx which is nice, very full info. It's a really nice feature that you can set things up so that they SMS you if your DSL line dies or loses sync, router disappears or other bad thing happens.
waltergmw:
@ Weaver,
I believe one mechanism for so doing is to ask BT W to order a retrain taking 10 days and which also recalculates your MSR and FTR.
There is some more explanation here:-
http://www.zensupport.co.uk/knowledgebase/article.aspx?id=10593
Kind regards,
Walter
Weaver:
Thanks Walter. That's an excellent tip. I have also been a Zen customer at a different site and I noticed this reporting goodness in the Zen www UI. I hadn't thought of it that way round.
And presumably ending up having a better FTR afterwards is no bad thing long term, a benefit in itself.
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