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Comment by andyking | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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!

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.

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.

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".

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