As you will have noticed, we have very honest pricing on our web site - we don't have silly special offers with 6 months free that tie you in for 18 months. We try to offer the option of services without a minimum term where our carriers allow us - we want people to stay because we are doing a good job not because they are tied in. It can, however, be tricky to explain why you would get broadband from us. So here are a few questions to ask yourself or your ISP...
We don't use an overseas call centre, in fact we don't really run a call centre as such.
We have skilled, technical people, with English as a first language, directly employed by us, based in our offices in Bracknell, Berkshire, and in Ebbw Vale, Wales. We're happy to talk on the phone or via email, SMS, IRC or web chat... whichever you prefer.
Our tech support staff are not following a script. They have access to detailed line monitoring and diagnostics tests, some of which are unique to A&A. Whilst "turning it off and back on again" can be valid, it is far from our standard response. Our support staff have training in low level protocols and understand networking. They have seen the equipment we use, and have even visited a telephone exchange and seen how equipment connects together and understand how things work for real. You don't even need to say Shibboleet.
We have a published policy of trying not to be the bottleneck, which means investing in extra capacity to avoid slowing down lines during busy times.
We monitor every line, every second. We know exactly how your broadband is performing, we create graphs that staff and customers can view to see drops, packet loss, latency, and traffic speed. These graphs update in real time and we keep the graphs for historical analysis in the event of your line having a fault.
We are very open about faults in our network, what happened, and what we are doing to stop them happening again. Any complex network will have issues. Sometimes our openness and honesty makes it look like we have more problems than others ISPs, but we don't. When there is a fault that we don't control, such as a fault on a phone line itself, we have a tenacious team that are notorious with the carriers for taking no crap and getting things fixed properly. We even offer to take on faults where other ISPs have given up, with a money back guarantee.
We aren't just contactable by phone, we deal with customers in whatever way they find comfortable. We can work with customers using telephone, email, sms, irc and mastodon/fediverse. We have even been known to provide some out of hours tech support over WoW in-game chat before now. Whilst our support hours are eight to six, we have a dedicated team who are happy to help out if they can in their own time. We care about our service and our customers.
We operate our own network and have our own IPv4 and IPv6 space. We have many connections to the wider internet consisting of (but not limited to):
The above means that our customer traffic takes the shortest as possible route which improves performance, reduces latency and increases resilience. Find out more about our network here.
Many ISPs assume all of their customers are the same level of expertise. We have customers that have worked on kernel level device drivers on linux, or been involved in establishing public Internet services in the UK back in the 90's. We try not to make assumptions, but also try to cater for anyone that does know what they are talking about. We can set up reverse DNS for your IP address space. We do understand MTU issues and how to address them. We can make sense of a PPP negotiation dump. We have been offering IPv6 since 2002. We are always happy to discuss new services and leading edge technology and how we can accommodate your needs no matter how geeky. Don't worry if you are not a geek, as our staff have a lot of patience - they are not on the clock to handle as many calls per hour as possible, so do not be afraid to ask or say when you do not understand.
It is often not clear where people stand, or the principles companies try to work to. All companies have to act in the best interests of their members, but being a small company allows the owner and director's views to be taken in to account in the way the company works. A&A have a strong view on privacy and the mere conduit nature of Internet access. We don't monitor or intercept or block Internet traffic. The director has a blog which makes his views on many subjects clear. We even sponsor the Open Rights Group.
We also have more details on policy here.
