[Wiltshire] Any ISP recommendations please?

[Simon Iremonger]

Firstly to say, you are not the first to have trouble with vermin
media and trouble with intermittent wifi on supplied routers
(most who want better service put them into 'modem mode' and
connect their own devices/network/wifi-APs/etc instead).

A friend of mine has just got vermin media to cough up 200ukp
for persistent billing failures, and they have immediately
proceeded to repeat the mistake subsequently, and is wondering
the best way to keep getting more and more 100..200 ukp compensation
payments out of them [!!].


>> Whilst configuring it this morning I found that it refuses to forward
>> port 25 with some error message about it being reserved.
> It looks like you're trying to receive email from the world at large by
> having them connect to your dynamic home IP address which they pick up
> through the DNS MX record set with a dynamic DNS supplier?

That was my understanding, yes.


>> Does anybody have recommendations? I could get BT to reconnect the
>> copper phone line which would probably be simplest way
> Which? consistently rank Zen Internet at the top based on their
> evaluation and their subscribers' feedback.  Andrews & Arnold seem to be
> a favourite amongst technical people but their price reflects their
> quality, it seems.


I can +1 both AAISP and Zen as helpful Dual-Stack IPv4+IPv6 ISPs.
AAISP will arrange a 'copper pair' (dummy phone line) for A/V DSL,
Zen can arrange actual phone-service too if desired.


AAISP will even provide multiple IPv4 addresses if desired.
Their 'helpfulness' may be worth the extra money to you, customer
can access monitoring and test graphs themselves, contact *real*
staff in IRC or Email, etc....   They do have usage limits but
these are very high and keep the network free of excessive-users,
in my view/experience not really a problem for most.


With AAISP at least, you can have static IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
and set up forward-confirmed reverse-DNS on both, such that your
server can directly smtp email to remote recipients without
requiring any 3rd-party outgoing server nor any dynamic dns.


I do not know about Zen and IPv6 reverse DNS, I only have quite
outdated experience of their IPv4 reverse DNS system.


I can also recommend (or help with) how to put OpenWRT on a
BT HomeHub v5 Type A  which then gives you a reasonable mostly-
FOSS solution on WAN-router yet cheaply, noting that there are
few options for DSL-supporting OpenWRT devices.  These are limited
to about 160mbps CPU throughput, but then that is basically fine
for VDSL wan-lan traffic and wifi-lan traffic from the inbuilt
AP, and for about 20 pounds these things are amazing value for
money!.

A good plan is to have something like this with a Zen/AAISP
supplied zyxel/technicolor router as "tested working backup"
alongside.


--Simon