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Comment by arcza | Hacker News Reader

I already have an AAISP line coming on Monday! Very excited. AAISP = the new Zen.

The biggest difference you'll find is that when you phone support you'll probably be having a conversation with someone who knows more about networks and routing than you do. Doing first line support.

I figure the only way this is economic is because they have a technical customer base who phone support maybe twice a decade.

Years back I had a conversation with someone who had done a couple of ISP mergers, and his opinion was that techie-focused ISPs look fantastic on paper because their support costs are really low. Then someone buys them, tries to expand their userbase to "regular" people, and their support costs fall in line with the rest of the industry (eg Demon -> Thus -> Vodafone).

So far, A&A have avoided that fate.

So many people rave about the support A&A provides, but I don't really understand why support is so important to people.

Isn't a stable connection more important?

It is, but in many parts of the UK BT's equipment is knackered. So you rely on support to poke BT with a big stick to get things fixed quickly.

Not much they can do to improve that, as they're relying on Openreach same as everybody else. But when you phone them up because your copper pair dies every time it gets soggy and they say "Yeah, I can see it in the logs. That's a bit crap. Nothing I can do from this end but I'll get on to Openreach and email you in about ten minutes with an appointment" instead of "Ok, I'm going to talk you through rebooting your BT Hub", it leaves a positive impression.

Oh, and on the subject of stability, they send me an SMS every time my line goes up/down. Even if it happens at 4AM. They don't have to, other ISPs hope you won't notice, it's just a nice feature.

> Isn't a stable connection more important?

Support is for the times where the connection isn't stable, and it appears AAISP handles these situations better.

> I don't really understand why support is so important to people.

Support is not important, until you need it.

There are alt-net providers out there (who shall remain nameless) whose engineers are trained to practically breathe down the necks of their customer just after installation in order to get them to post a 5-star review on Trustpilot. However the reality is when the customer has an issue down the line, they discover to their horror that the post-sales support is shit.

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