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Which ISP To Go For (FTTC) - Discussion

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kitz:
As gt94 said.... AAISP should still be able to supply.
That info you have been given above is for TT backhaul - you do not want EAD (ethernet on demand). TT wont be interested as they cant take your phone line.

AAISP can still provision you using the BTw backhaul.  - In fact iirc your FTTC headend exchange is at Bangor.


See below (info for a shop local to you)

NewtronStar:
I did check a few ISP sites with phone number  >:( I am going to be bombarded with calls tomorrow from the sales department.

Origin is ok £21.58 per month
for the first 6 months, £31.58 thereafter the same as EE
Including Broadband & Line Rental

Sky is a No and Zen is OK but very expensive £43.99* per month including line rental and alos remember to take into account the small print of migration charge it's £49 to move from EE to BT

Weaver:
I use AA over BTW, there is no TT LLU around here at all. In fact there’s no LLU of any sort at any of the local exchanges as far as I’m aware, although I haven't rechecked recently.

AA use both BTW and TT LLU on some of the deals they offer. Their 1TB deals are contingent on TTB backhaul being available though because they've done a bulk purchasing buy with TT I think. In the past they have encouraged customers to use a bonded mixture of BTW and TT LLU lines at the one site because of enhanced reliability.

Some customers prefer TT LLU because of the lack of stupid DLM.

Chrysalis:
I think aaisp will never be able to do the 1TB deal on BTw given TT backhaul is almost 1/3 of the cost per mbit.

Weaver:
Luckily for me, they don't charge more to users like me who are on a BTW exchange. For users such as me who buy a variable number of download ‘units’ each month, which is their old traditional tariff, they used to charge twice as much per byte for daytime peak office hours downloads on 20CN compared with 21CN or TT (and I was 20CN last year). Outside of peak hours, on the traditional tariff the download bytes/£ rate is vastly cheaper and is independent of the kind of line or exchange.

The traditional units-based tariff, which I prefer, is quite different from the more recent Home::1, Office::1x, Home::1TB etc deals (anything with a "::" in the title) where you have to pre-purchase a large per-month minimum download allowance, there's no time-of-day related charging and you can't buy only a small amount. On the double-colon deals, if you go over your download quota it either eats up some of next month’s quota, or you can buy a large top-up extra lump, or it slows down for the rest of the month - you have a choice depending on which deal you pick. It gets quite confusing because they give you a lot of choice. They sell Ethernet services as well as IP and that's probably something different again in terms of charging model for all I know.

One of the things that attracted me to AA even though I was also using Zen (at a different site) was the fact that I could get a fat block of global static IPv4 addresses, as much as I wanted, plus extra individual IPv4s as needed, all at no cost. (And a static IPv6 /48 plus extras as much as I want.) When I was a Demon user originally I had just 1 static IPv4, then I changed deal to get a decent-sized IPv4 block. When I signed up with Zen as a trial they only offered me a measly static IPv4 /29, and as for IPv6 they just kept coming out with excuses about why they hadn't implemented IPv6 support year after year. Zen was in the end simply ruled out as no native link bonding, no IPv6 and no fat IPv4 block in the deals I had seen, all of which were must-haves.

There were other things I liked about AA (too many to bore you with) at the time, and I discovered more good things later. Their attitude, “no bull” policy, transparent about everything, no corporate ‘wall’ to hide behind, non-glossy, no marketing / farketing-speak where everything is vague or misleading. You know the people, actual humans not a corporate black box. They're presumably still tiny, even compared with say Zen. And another thing dear to my heart is the fact that the company is run by an ultra-techie, not a management suit-type, an extremely serious hardcore professional software designer (and a gamer), who writes code all the time.

I loathe the phone, so I like the fact that you can talk to a particular known human with a name via every kind of electronic means conceivable: IRC and web chat, SMS, email, even twitter. Being able to talk to other users on IRC is extremely helpful because they really know their stuff.

One last thing, which I only discovered later. This post is way too long anyway, but it's more about my priorities and AA's website is a bit of a warren, I find. Originally I was going to use a big fat Juniper modem/router/firewall that I had got off eBay, which had two DSL modem cards in it. But I just couldn't work out how to configure it properly, or it was a duff eBay purchase, not sure which. Anyway I bought a Firebrick router instead which was beautiful. AA collaborate with WatchFront in a joint venture in the design and evolution of the various Firebrick models’ o/s, and the boss of AA, RevK, is always working on core Firebrick code as the o/s gets continual development. I love the fact that I can get router support and handholding straight from the horse’s mouth, from the actual developers not through umpteen layers of customer-prevention minions. And it's free. It's also a one-stop-shop for problems. Whatever might be wrong, it's always AA where the buck stops, be it a router bug (of course I myself could have cocked up the router or firewall config, so my badness) or a modem problem, or a line fault or network fault, whatever, it's all down to AA alone to sort it, I'm never stuck in between two organisations. And there's none of this PSTN-fault vs DSL-fault nonsense either, as I don't pay line rental to anyone else, so there's no faffing about with deciding what category a fault falls into. (I don't have POTS service, no SSFPs or micro-filters and no extensions, nothing that might have even the tiniest chance of degrading DSL performance.)

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