[SWLUG] Switching to a BT line. Effects?

[Matt Willsher]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 1:17 PM, Dick Bain <dick.bain at gmail.com> wrote:

> Zen have been great for me and several other people that I have
> recommended them to, they are extremely helpful and have taken up
> cudgels against BT twice for my friends, both times highlighting the
> faults that the contractors for BT had missed
> Dick
> ps they aren't the cheapest but "pay peanuts get monkeys" ;-)


I've been with A&A for some time now and they are far and away the best ISP
I have used. They are expensive if you're using bandwidth during their peak
hours (9am-6pm Mon-Fri) but outside that, they're unlimited (or were - I
understand they might be moving to a 100GB/month limit). I'm currently at
home and use the Internet a reasonable amount during the day for browsing
and email, some downloads and my monthly bill on the Max 1 (£18.99 basic for
1GB + ££ extra per GB) comes to about £22. For that I get my domain hosted
and renewed by them free of charge, as many IP addresses as I reasonably
want (currently a /28 and a /30), IPv6 connectivity, IMAP email. For £1 a
month you can have a VoIP phone number (although any one can do that
regardless of the ISP).

In addition, their support is excellent. While they are at the mercy of BT,
that are very good at chasing faults and getting them resolved ASAP,
something past ISPs I've been with haven't been very good at. They also have
a IRC channel which often has staff/management on and they can offer a great
deal of advise and information (I found a bug in their IPv6 over PPPoE. They
had is fixed same evening and moved me over to the test routers with the fix
in. That's what I call service! :) ).

Ethically they're very good, and go as far as to state their are no 'black
boxes' on their network for monitoring and are open about what data they do
collect and why (e.g. so many packets an hour for DOS detection, but they
are only used for that purpose). They are also actively against any
filtering of the bandwidth.

As far as a BT line goes, it's not likely to be good as VM. I should be
getting the maximum speed from my line as I live 500m from my exchange and
get a very good single strength, but for some reason it's not stable and I
get less.

A&A are starting to roll out ADSL2+ as BT convert exchanges, which seems to
be quicker than most exchanges.

All in all, I heartily recommend A&A.

Matt
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