A UK ISP which is fighting against censorship | Hacker News Reader

A UK ISP which is fighting against censorship

aa.net.uk

166 pointsoakesm964 comments

They're also XKCD/806 compliant!

http://xkcd.com/806/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrews_%26_Arnold

If they weren't so pricey I'd get their service for this alone

They're really not all that pricey, I think - you're paying for an upgraded service and bandwidth off-peak is cheap. If you don't want to pay for that upgraded service (£10-20 per month?), it's probably not all that important to you.

They're great if you work in an office. They get a little pricier if you work from home and need to actually use your connection a lot by day.

A&A are great, they've also fought tooth and nail against lame "Great Firewall" projects and the three-strikes p2p aberration.

I really wanted to give them money, but they can't use the Virgin cable network. My BT copper line goes over a far-west-style pole, because XIX-century northern terraces weren't exactly built for telecom geeks, so ADSL is no match for the underground early-1990s coax laid by NTL (now Virgin). When I'll move somewhere with a decent copper link, I'll probably go with A&A straight away; yes they are expensive, but it's not always about the bottom line.

You can ask them for an L2TP connection, using Virgin as a pure bearer to the AA network and breaking out from there. Clearly any usage caps from Virgin will still apply, but the IP provision will be from people who know what they're doing.

A variation of this that they could pick up and run with is to offer a VPN solution so you can terminate your traffic at A&A regardless of who is the better broadband provider in your area.

I am a customer of this ISP, and I can recommend them.

They are much better set up for dealing with the technically-inclined customer than mainstream providers.

I know of no other ISP that designs routers from scratch - electronics & software, including OS.

They don't. They bought them all in.

The Firebrick range is all custom dev. They'll sell you a commodity router quite happily, but they're 50% responsible for Firebrick.

A presentation by their MD on the backstory: http://online.ipexpo.co.uk/Videos/Adrian-Kennard-presents-Br...

Ok didn't know that - thanks for the info!

Um could have this wrong, but as far as I am aware, most ISP are against this filtering. This came up a few weeks ago, and they basically said no. This is why now Camoron is banging on about threatening legislation to make them do it.

That said, the ISPs objections are likely cost, rather than protecting freedom. Much like Camoron, this is pandering and nanny stare, rather than really caring about children. To him this is a tick box ticked which costs the treasury nothing, he gets the ISPs to pay for his votes.

All quite seedy.

"That said, the ISPs objections are likely cost"

And rightly so. If this goes through, i'd like to see the ISPs add a line item to everyone's bill calling this out in plain sight to all their customers. "This month you paid an extra #1.75 to cover the costs of Government censorship infrastructure we're required to purchase / install / maintain.

Mobile providers already provide this filtering. I have to keep asking for "Content Lock" (or somesuch) to be removed when I renew my 3g mobile broadband dongle.

If that's all he wants it seems trivially easy to supply it. I'm gently surprised the ISPs haven't already done so. That way they'd have a simple example to point to when the government asks for more stuff. "Look, we already did the filter, and it's hopeless, but it's what you asked for. Trust us on this - what you're asking for can be done, but should not be done."

It's the classic example of clueless people asking the wrong question. "How can I do $THIS?" "Well, you can do $THIS, but no-one in their right minds would do this because it's stupid. You could do $THAT, and $OTHER, which is better and covers most of what you want without so much stupid." Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working with UK Gov.

Giffgaff likewise default to "delicate sensibilities" mode. Of course, when I tried to access a grown-up site, I assumed it was broken, raised it on the forum. Trivial to resolve but IMO a bug not a feature.

Vodafone does that too. I found out when I was trying to look up a wine at tesco.com and it was blocked.

Dunno about mobiles, TBH,

But I 100% agree that it is surprising that the likes of Virgin (my ISP) haven't just added a tick box in their router setup. Even it its not perfect, its something they could point to, to shut up the nannies. And of course over time, they can just improve or adjust the filtering to get it as good as the nannies want. It could easily be a simple update to the router.

Might also demonstrate how hard it actually is. But at least it would be a simple option for those who want it.

A&A also provide an unfiltered 3G SIM for mobile broadband, including static IP addressing.

They have already added the 'active choice' option:

Tell us which you would like:

* Unfiltered Internet access - no filtering of any content within the A&A network - you are responsible for any filtering in your own network

* Censored Internet access - restricted access to unpublished government mandated filter list - still cannot guarantee kids don't access porn

With the latter choice informing the user:

Sorry, for a censored internet you will have to pick a different ISP. Our services are all unfiltered.

http://revk.www.me.uk/2013/07/active-choice.html

https://order.aa.net.uk/h1order.cgi

This is about right. The only ISPs in Britain which do not fuck with your connection are A&A and Zen. I'm with Zen, if I wasn't I'd be with A&A.

That's definitely incorrect. ADSL24 don't apply filtering, and I imagine that many of the small ISPs don't. There's no legal obligation for any ISP to apply filtering.

Definitely an interesting service. A bit of a shame that after repeatedly encouraging the use of encryption, their site doesn't support HTTPS.

Their content pages don't (they are entirely static) but their order form stuff does, obviously.

HTTPS end to end isn't really worth it for some things.

> HTTPS end to end isn't really worth it for some things.

Don't agree. Serving HTTPS is cheap now, and it's easier just to put _everything_ on SSL and avoid the mental effort of deciding what goes where.

Ah, but part of their argument is that it is always worth it so that when it is worth it, that content doesn't stand out. So, by their own argument, they should enable https even for the static content pages.

Not that it's particularly expensive either. A single domain cert can be found for a few bucks, a wildcard for under 100.

Most of the cost for a high-traffic website is processing requests over SSL, not the price of the cert.

Really? SSL is dirt cheap to compute these days. Google saw a 1% increase in CPU usage when they made SSL mandatory for Gmail.

http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/2/10/dispelling-the-new...

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.h...

it depends on the cipher and your software, I had tremendous trouble with some free php forum stuff recently when it curled things with PFS.

AES is implemented in hardware now. RSA is cheap to compute; SHA1 is not even a factor. If you want forward secrecy, DON'T use DHE, use ECDHE; plain DHE is expensive.

To be fair nearly all PHP forum software is crap.

They are also hideously expensive. I looked at them when I moved house a while ago - but their pricing, for the transfer-capped service you get, is extortionate.

And if all ISPs are to be legally obliged to "provide" this filtering, A&A will not be an exception. So what are you paying the extra for - a few platitudes on a web page?

they're only expensive if you're at home 9-5 during weekdays.

I never am so it's £20/month for about 100GB (and effectively unlimited transfer in the early hours of the morning).

they now also offer a flat 50GB at anytime for £25/month.

you're paying extra for for native IPv6, beyond excellent service, an excellent control panel with options most ISPs don't have, as many IP addresses as you want (optionally PI), custom routing (want an AS for your house?), ability to dual bond across different providers, ability to add 3g as backup link, and much more...

they're truly excellent, here's an example of their customer service on IRC:

    1417.59| [bootc] ok, really long shot, but any staff tech around who fancy allocating me some more IPs?
    1418.27| [bootc] I already feel rather greedy but I'm using most of my IPs already :-/
    1423.30| [@AA-Paul] bootc: What login, and what size block?
    1424.14| [bootc] AA-Paul: abc1@a, and a /28 of legacy if possible?
    1424.21| [bootc] for @a.1
    1425.31| [bootc] I then need to re-number internally and expand my /27 sub-division of my /26 to the full /26 :-/
    1426.31| [@AA-Paul] bootc: Done. 1.2.3.4/28 will be routed to you when your router next logs in
    1426.57| [bootc] AA-Paul: many thanks, you're a star! have a great rest of your weekend
    1427.10| [@AA-Paul] No problem. You too :)

(no I don't work for them, but am an extremely happy customer)

+1 for this. Another customer here.

Every time I call, the person on the other end knows their shit straight away.

They managed to un-screw-up my LLU phone service and broadband as well (screw you Telefonica and OpenReach!!!)

They're really cheap for what you get. I pay £45/month for Home::1 which is for me 150Gb + line rental.

O2 for the same was £37.50 dynamic IP and their support staff were fucking muppets.

150GB/month usage?

I often push 150GB in a single night!

That's just greed!

Your house can't have a public AS unless you are going to register it with RIPE, which will also require a second transit provider from a separate network.

I eat through 100GB a month in gaming and netflixing...

Netflix x 4 (we're 4 at home), soundcloud, 1080p youtube, gaming, dropbox, backing up a couple of pc's to the cloud...

I don't like third parties to assume what a normal bandwidth usage is for me. I like my internet uncapped and unthrottled.

> I like my internet uncapped and unthrottled.

Which, for an ISP aiming at a market segment of people like you/us, is a fine way to lose all your lucrative business contracts because it's almost impossible to predict capacity & maintain your quoted contention rates under those conditions. Certainly few home users can afford/justify a totally unmetered uncontended connection at the sorts of speeds[1] we're used to seeing on ISP adverts. The credits/carry over monthly unused capacity[2] is a reasonable middle ground I suppose, although ideally it'd be finer granularity, but then again, would mess with capacity planning, and maybe expose users to serious overage charges without realising.

Whilst it doesn't directly affect your main point, it looks like they only count downstream data, so backups (in the general, non-restore case) wouldn't affect it much.

[Not a customer, although I'd be tempted to if I could afford it (I just checked, and probably can't)]

[1] Maximum speed may be less than quoted depending on your location. Fair Use Policies (We cap/throttle/terminate your account anyway, we just don't tell you about it up-front), Terms of Service (often including not running internet visible servers, and certainly not 25/tcp or maybe 80/tcp even then).

[2] Albeit with "within reason" weasel-words

They don't throttle, though they do have a cap. But when they say "you get this much" you get all of it, without fuckery.

this looked so amazing that I tried to switch from virgin to aa... turns out it's £20/month + £12 line rental / month = £32/month. For Home::1, it's £25/month + £10 line rental / month = £35/month. So I don't agree it's cheap.

Yes, they are more expensive than the main stream providers. And they're worth it, just like it is worth paying more for a good chair and a good keyboard if you use those a lot.

I use the internet a lot and I care about it, so I gladly pay a little more to get a good one that isn't throttled, censored, monitored (at least not at ISP level) and poorly run. I also like to support an ISP that campaigns (and acts) for things that matter to me, such as net neutrality.

My only worry is that A&A is without equal in the UK, and if they ever go away, I'd be forced to lower my expectations a lot. Most other ISPs have caved in to the creeping censorship and offer pretty awful service/support to boot (when I was on BeO2fonica it took them 10 days to fix a broken DSL line, which is how I ended up with A&A).

Look for enta-net re-sellers. There's a lot of them, and the connection that you get seems to work pretty well. I've noticed 6 hours of downtime in the past 8 years from EN resellers and they're usually one-man bands that you can call up and speak to.

> And if all ISPs are to be legally obliged to "provide" this filtering, A&A will not be an exception

This is what they are doing: http://revk.www.me.uk/2013/07/active-choice.html

I suspect they'll get away with it because they're not a popular consumer option. Not sure if Virgin would.

Yes, they put the choice up-front on their order page. https://order.aa.net.uk/h1order.cgi

'Expensive' is relative. I'd rather have an ISP that was transparent about what I was paying for, than one which lied to me that I could get an 'unlimited connection' for £20pm.

Take another look, if you were moving more than ~6 months ago - their Home::1 service isn't the cheapest, but isn't stupidly priced.

Thanks all for your well-reasoned praise of this ISP outfit. I knew they were good, but very expensive - when I last looked, my current usage would have cost me north of £50 a month. Home:1 appears to be £25 (with the option to double your cap for a heavy month for a tenner), which is comparable to my current monthly bill.

I currently pay about £20 a month to Eclipse, who are very good indeed - except for the fact that IPv6 is perpetually currently being tested and coming soon. I live in a rural area, no fibre, so I wanted the best normal ADSL connection I could get for a reasonable amount. I'm likely to be moving again in the next six months (job "changes" apparently looming) so I'll re-consider A&A when I do.

I miss South Yorkshire's Digital Region. Origin Broadband was uncapped, unthrottled, unfiltered 40Mbps fibre for £22.50 a month...

I can guarantee that it's impossible for any ISP to offer an uncapped 40Mbit connection for £22.50 pm. That's a theoretical bandwidth of 13TB per month. They'd be losing bucketloads of cash if you did that - that kind of bandwidth costs _thousands_.

This is the problem AAISP have. Everyone else promises things they can't deliver, for absurd prices. Someone comes along with a moderately sustainable pricing model, and suddenly they're expensive.

I used to be with Eclipse. They were great, then they were bought by Kingston who were bloomin' clueless. Been with Zen since 2005.

I had never heard of Origin before this comment, thanks!

Another clueful UK-based ISP is http://www.goscomb.net/

Have been very happy with my 80/20 FTTC service. /48 Native IPv6 and /29 IPv4, 300GB transfer/month (with no relationship to times used) for £60/month.

I'm a big fan of AAISP as well (had a bonded ADSL setup with them a while back), but the time-of-day restriction on bandwidth used isn't so great if you've got non-technical torrent-happy housemates.

There's no legislation being proposed to require filtering. The existing IWF blacklist isn't legally required and it's actual child abuse imagery.

This is the government forcing the four/five largest ISPs to comply or face the threat of regulation. Those ISPs will cover 80-90% of the population, which is enough for the government to be seen to be doing something.

A&A are making hay out of this, but no one's going to force them to apply filtering, and there's other ISPs that offer unfiltered access.

Really wish the pricing was more reasonable, the costs are just too high.

£40/month for 80/20 FTTC, an additional £20/month to increase the data transfer cap to 250GB (could possibly get away with £10/month for 150GB, but I wouldn't want to risk it).

£60/month is just too much. I'd be willing to pay a small premium - but not that much of one.

I think more in terms of "you get all of what you pay for".

Wish there wore more ISPs like this in UK. Also I wish their offerings were more in step with the times. :( Right now I get FTTC (80/20) from BT for £40, unlimited and unthrottled[1]. I'd be willing to pay a bit more for a similar service from AA.

[1] - whatever that means nowadays

I would love to go with them! But sadly I live in a rural area that barely gets 3mbps from the major companies so I doubt an independent would be able to get even that :-(

A&A uses lines from BT Openreach and TalkTalk Wholesale. They're great at getting the most from a line - if you're getting 3mbps from a major, you're likely to get as good or better with A&A.

Oh awesome, I'll look into it then!

How do they do that?

By not accepting poor performance from their suppliers, and by taking advantage of the control available for things like the SNR margin: http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-trial.html

Shut up and take my money!

Nice set of comments on this - scarily I think I have to say that someone is not wrong on the internet ( http://xkcd.com/386/ ) as I think people have replied sensibly to concerns. We do try to do things right at A&A. I know it costs a tad more, but I don't think it unreasonable for what we office and we try to fit what people want (hence new Home::1 tariff, and so on). See www.me.uk for more views.

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