I'm with Andrews & Arnold. I won't need to tell them anything because I know they take my privacy very seriously. They're the best ISP I've ever dealt with.
Another happy A&A customer here. In a world of every ISP being amazing, they'd take the crown as the best one.
I get an amazingly advanced web UI which lets me do things nobody can do on any other ISPs (advanced options on my line etc). I can get a text/email/tweet whenever my line goes down and back up. I can hop on IRC and talk to sales/tech or even the owner (this[1] is his blog, by the way - He writes a lot, I recommend following him). And needless to say, full ipv6 support.
They're expensive, but that's because they don't oversell bandwidth. People constantly complain about ISPs overselling, but when someone comes along and does not do that, people say "Oh but it's too expensive".
"Even in 2013 it is almost unique to find a "home" package that includes IPv6. In IPv6 ::1 is the address for "Home". Calling it Home127.0.0.1 seemed silly."
I did consider switching to them, but the plan I looked at (Fiber to the cabinet and a higher 200GB download cap) comes in at £50 + (as far as I'm aware) BT line rental, so around £66/month... My BT bill for the above is around £40... Do you think it's worth the extra £26 ish for peace and mind? Are they really that much better than other ISPs? Thanks for the info!
EDIT: Ignore my comment, after reading up on them a bit more, they do seem like a pretty amazing ISP. Thanks for reminding me of them :)
Looks like they've cut their prices with that home::1 offering, I would seriously consider moving back there if I wasn't really satisfied with my current ISP. (I'm with goscomb.net at the moment due to my higher bandwidth requirements - comes in around £20/month cheaper than the equivalent AASIP setup with 450GB/transfer, 80:20 FTTC profile, IPv6 and a /29 IPv4).
Used these guys years ago for bonded ADSL and they were awesome, can't rate them high enough.
To any reasonably well-paid tech professional saving £30/month by going with one of the 'Big Four' ISPs: Buy cheap beef, get horse-meat.
That's pretty much the A&A plan that I have, and I think it's worth it for me. This is a case where you get what you pay for, and I both need an excellent level of service (because I depend on my ISP for work) and can afford to pay for it. The equation would be different for other, say, casual users or people on tight budgets.
Also ... IPv6 just works, and I have a /48 assignment.
A&A doesn't supply enough bandwidth for our home (including work from home) use, at least on their pricing page.
On a 5Mbps line, our average monthly usage was about 300G/month, according to router statistics.
Now that we're on BT FTTC at 76Mbps (rate to nearest speedtest.net when there's no contention), I wouldn't like to guess the usage, but I'd estimate over 1TB a month at least. The BT provided router resets its count every 30 minutes or so, and I've not yet put my own routing box in the middle, so I don't know exactly.
Both my GF and I stream a lot of HD video, and I mirror a number of repositories every week. That video is a lot more HD now, and there's far less need to ever turn it off, since it doesn't significantly affect other users.
A more feasible approach would be to combine A&A with BT, and switch depending on reliability vs bulk requirements, but that would require a level of systems administration I'd want to be compensated for.
Also great to be able to trigger BT's line tests directly from Andrews and Arnold's web interface, see the history of usage, line sync rates, etc. That, and their ability to configure low-delay shaping upstream of BT's backhaul so you don't build big download queues in the DSLAM. Greatly improves my VoIP quality. Another happy customer.
This is my favourite part:
"Sorry, for a censored internet you will have to pick a different ISP or move to North Korea. Our services are all unfiltered."
- Unfiltered Internet access - no filtering of any content within the A&A network - you are responsible for any filtering in your own network, or
- Censored Internet access - restricted access to unpublished government mandated filter list (plus Daily Mail web site) - but still cannot guarantee kids don't access porn.
