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[Ixel]

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?
- Do BT Retail offer 12 month or 1 month contracts for FTTC or FTTP?
- Do BT Retail offer static IPv4 address(es)?
- Do BT Retail have a similar set of options to choose from in their user control panel?
- Do BT Retail have somewhat detailed graphs indicating the state of the connection?
- 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)?
- 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)?
- Do BT Retail support bonding like AAISP offers?

Need I go on.

[DaveC]

I’ve been thinking about changing to one of their modern deals but I don’t understand the economics of it with so many lines.

Presumably you have 1 line on the units tariff, and the other lines on "no quota", which share the quota of the first line.

Have you spoken to A&A about the possibility of moving your first line to a current tariff and keeping "no quota" on the other lines?  They don't offer "no quota" lines to new customers any more, but if you ask, maybe they will let you keep yours.

[j0hn]

All your points are very valid, except

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)?

Not that I'm aware of. I don't think there has been traffic shaping since torrents a number of years ago.

I got full throughput 24/7 on Talktalk, BT, Plusnet and now get the same with Virgin.

AAISP don't need to filter the usual banned list of sites (banned by the high court) that the big 6 need to ban.

[Ronski]

Comparing the price of AAISP vs BT Retail is a bit nonsensical in my opinion.

<snip>

Need I go on.

I think you somewhat misunderstood the question, it wasn't one of comparison of services or value, merely price.

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.

[Alex Atkin UK]

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.

[niemand]

As someone who's hardly not a demanding consumer yet has chosen BT Consumer I'll put in my 2p, or indeed 2 Euro cents looking at the exchange rate, or actually 2 USD cents.

Comparing the price of AAISP vs BT Retail is a bit nonsensical in my opinion.

Agreed. Luckily no-one has. Weaver asked a question.

Do BT Retail generally have a similar high quality customer support experience compared to AAISP, when it's needed?

No.

Do BT Retail offer 12 month or 1 month contracts for FTTC or FTTP?

No - caveat that all FTTP comes with a 12 month contract.

Do BT Retail offer static IPv4 address(es)?

Only BT Business. However I made the decision to suck it up and handle it via dynamic DNS and short-lived TTL records.

Do BT Retail have a similar set of options to choose from in their user control panel?

No, though I'm not sure of the value of those for FTTP.

Do BT Retail have somewhat detailed graphs indicating the state of the connection?

No, though I'm not sure of the value of those for FTTP. Can be trivially done via Think Broadband BQM and the home router.

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)?

No.

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)?

They do not.

Do BT Retail support bonding like AAISP offers?

They do not, however I would point out that they have tier options A&A do not, and it's a non-issue for FTTP as you'll have single points of failure everywhere from the home onwards and there's no shortage of bandwidth. For those wanting failover plenty of home CPE do this now.

Need I go on.

No, though you did answer a question that only you asked.

[Ixel]

To clarify, my post regarding comparing BT Retail's (or BT Consumer) pricing to AAISP's pricing wasn't in response to Weaver but instead to another member mentioning the price of AAISP being much higher than BT Retail. That's why I brought in a type of comparison. It wasn't specifically targeted at FTTP only either, as I did include the mention of FTTC. I doubt virtually anyone would consider bonding FTTP haha . On a final note, BT Retail's FTTP contracts appear to not offer 12 month, yes I know FTTP has a minimum of 12 month but I brought up that particular bullet point as BT Retail don't offer 12 month contracts on FTTP from what I can see, while some other ISP's such as AAISP do. However AAISP need to eventually adapt their service to cater for faster connection speeds on FTTP, or eventually risk becoming somewhat outdated.

[Weaver]

> However AAISP need to eventually adapt their service to cater for faster connection speeds on FTTP, or eventually risk becoming somewhat outdated.

Absolutely, couldn’t agree more. And it’s wholly suitable for the ecological niche that they are in to offer highest speeds. They really need to address this.

[Ronski]

To clarify, my post regarding comparing BT Retail's (or BT Consumer) pricing to AAISP's pricing wasn't in response to Weaver but instead to another member mentioning the price of AAISP being much higher than BT Retail.

That was probably me, as a direct answer to Weaver's question as to whether AA were more expensive than BT. Us regulars are well aware why they are. 

[niemand]

Absolutely, couldn’t agree more. And it’s wholly suitable for the ecological niche that they are in to offer highest speeds. They really need to address this.

Then they need to drop the fixation with offering all the pretty graphs and stats or build massively overspecified kit and use most of that power that should be routing to produce pretty graphs.

The compromise is to run BQM-type boxes relying on ICMP separately alongside, perhaps, outputting utilisation data to those BQM boxes from the LNS which will just do LNS duty, not line monitoring.

Could use off the shelf kit with hardware acceleration and loads of capacity rather than their own.

The vibe I have gotten from them is that they are strongly resistant to change. They believe they know best and are not especially interested in the thoughts of others.

They would rather do things 'right' and 'win the argument' by building everything from scratch than terminate connections on cheaper, third party kit from conversations I've had.

There are broadband edge routers / BRAS with terabit capacities now. A&A are using kit with a gigabit port in and one out.

Meanwhile Cisco have routers that can do BNG detail and run with 160 Gbps ports.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/routers/asr-9000-series-aggregation-services-routers/index.html

[burakkucat]

Then they need to drop the fixation with offering all the pretty graphs . . .

<snip>

. . . they are strongly resistant to change. They believe they know best and are not especially interested in the thoughts of others.

They would rather do things 'right' and 'win the argument' by building everything from scratch than terminate connections on cheaper, third party kit . . .

<snip>

So I am not alone. Others have similar thoughts.

As for "knowing best", anyone who has read the Firebrick documentation, with the hope of finding an example of how to configure a particular feature, will come away "having been lectured to" on a totally irrelevant topic! 

[Alex Atkin UK]

So I am not alone. Others have similar thoughts.

As for "knowing best", anyone who has read the Firebrick documentation, with the hope of finding an example of how to configure a particular feature, will come away "having been lectured to" on a totally irrelevant topic! 

We only need to look to Plusnet who used a fancy system to do packet shaping in the early days but ditched it once it become completely impractical to scale it to their increasing customer base.  They even stopped monitoring bandwidth usage for services like Netflix, etc, as it was too high a load and reducing throughput.  Basically what little monitoring they had, has slowly gone away because its a huge waste of resources.

Most monitoring should be done at the customer side, where its up to the end user to take the brunt in increasing hardware and power consumption costs.

[kitz]

>> Basically what little monitoring they had, has slowly gone away because its a huge waste of resources.

Was that not more to do with the cost of bandwidth?   When the Ellacoyas were first implemented, it was at the time when BTw bandwidth was hugely expensive and cost the SP ~£1 per GB on the old centrals.       The old MiSP backhauls were originally built for leased lines and bandwidth was at a premium. 

Things changed with 21CN - the backhauls were completely redesigned and the use of WDM ensued much cheaper bandwidth as the pipes were now able to carry way more bandwidth at a fraction of the cost.    20CN has now gone and MiSP has been closed down, but in the days when both networks were in use 20CN was still more expensive for the ISP and BTw.   In fact BTw even had Ellacoyas on their own backhauls near to the bRAS.   One of the rumours was that BT was interested in PN because certain  PN staff were considered 'experts' in configuring the ellacoyas...  as PN were 'the ISP' that went through all the teething issues at a time when deep packet traffic shaping was a new thing. 

Now that everything is 21CN and using WDM, bandwidth is no longer the expensive commodity it once was and therefore the ellacoyas are redundant.    'Unlimited' wasn't really a viable option for any ISP using 20CN IPStream.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Could be, I left Plusnet originally because for some reason my Usenet traffic was permanently throttled despite it supposed to only throttle after a certain amount of bandwidth per month.  This went on for months with no resolution.

More recently though they excluded certain traffic from their bandwidth monitoring (have they ditched bandwidth monitoring entirely now?  I can't seem to find it) and I'm fairly sure they said the reason was it allowed the traffic to flow more freely.  (makes sense, presumably more diverse routing/caching can be done if you skip the monitoring)

[j0hn]

More recently though they excluded certain traffic from their bandwidth monitoring (have they ditched bandwidth monitoring entirely now?  I can't seem to find it) and I'm fairly sure they said the reason was it allowed the traffic to flow more freely.  (makes sense, presumably more diverse routing/caching can be done if you skip the monitoring)

Nothing to do with resources or allowing traffic to flow more freely.

The bandwidth usage monitor didn't/doesn't count certain traffic, such as traffic from caches and CDN's, making it a bit useless.

It's traffic shaping that was resource intensive.
A simple bandwidth usage monitor takes very little resources.