New usage allowances and prices from November

New usage allowances and prices from November http://s.aa.net.uk/1240

The RevK Rant/Blog might also be of interest if you haven't seen it http://revk.www.me.uk/2011/09/putting-up-prices.html

So an extra 60p a month for a connection with half the bandwidth allowance (I mainly use my connection off-peak). That is a shame.

I won't be moving though, as I'm not a heavy user. I prefer the fast / non-contended speed when I need it (which is rarely but occassionaly). The extra peak usage is welcomed, as I sometimes work from home and eat about 0.4 units just in a single day doing that. I also like the native IPv6.

So if I compare AA with all other ISP offerings (which support IPv6), that leaves (according to TBB) Idnet and Exa Networks. Neither of those match how I use my connection, so for £32 a month (which includes the VAT and phone line), I'm staying put.

RevK's blog comment sums it up nicely:

People tend to buy because of quality and personal recommendation. It costs for us to provide quality. Perhaps we are reassuringly expensive now. I hope so.

PS - I bet this is also to do with the line rental charge increases BT announced a while ago - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4316-bt-to-raise-...

I think it is more what was explained in the blog. Whereas before they had loads of spare off-peak capacity, this is not so much the case any more, so they're trying to get more usage within the peak time to level it out.

Matt

That was last year.

> So if I compare AA with all other ISP offerings (which support IPv6), that
> leaves (according to TBB) Idnet and Exa Networks.

Hi mixt,

Goscomb also offer native IPv6 as well as a choice of BE or BT back-haul.

I don't know much about them as yet but looking around as I'm paying > 40 quid a month for a pretty average experience.

One of the selling points of the AA-BE connections was that the back-haul costs were much lower than BT Wholesale, hence the higher allowances ( 125 GB versus 50 ). After this new price change there is no difference compared to BTW allowances, so where are those reduced costs going? Not to the end-users, certainly.

Oh yes, I forgot about Goscomb (saw the name floating about on here a while back). Good call.

Yes, I agree with your statement with the BT vs BE back-haul. Do keep in mind though that an AA connection using the BE back-haul network compared to BT is about £20 more expensive per month, so in my opinion, unless you are on a severally congested BT exchange, getting poor speeds due to high contention, or are wanting to transfer more per month on a regular basis, or generally have money to burn, going with the BE option is pretty expensive for sure (not something I am considering at all).

Goscomb certainly look good - Be LLU connection for £26 a month with 200Gb limit. However, let's not forget the extra £10-£12 one would pay for line rental, which would bump the overall cost to £36/£38 a month, which is still more expensive than AA so - they still aren't tempting me (this is assuming that Goscomb can take on the line rental charge, I don't see that on their site just glancing, one of the things I like about AA is the 'broadband only' line option where I pay one company for the entire lot, line rental+broadband).

Would have been nice to be emailed about it (just had a scan through my mail for the last month and I can't see anything).

The higher 2.5G/unit peak rate seems to have been applied to my account already, though the 50Gb off-peak rate has not, I assume that will turn up next month.

I have noticed what appears to be downstream congestion at certain off-peak times in the last couple of weeks, though I've not looked into whether the location of the bottleneck might be within A&A or BT (at the exchange and so forth). If that congestion is within A&A or between A&A and BT then this change will actually be beneficial to me as I can shuffle more transfers to sit in the 0200-0600 window to keep within the units I pre-pay for. Failing that I'll just start filing expenses claims for the things I transfer here for work (where geography and exchange capability limits us to ~2.0Mbit down and 0.8 up on ADSL) until such time as they get the 10Mbit+ leased line I've submitted cost/benefit documents regarding...

In reply to a post by dspillett:

Would have been nice to be emailed about it (just had a scan through my mail for the last month and I can't see anything).

Just to let you know, we emailed customers that would be affected by this change yesterday afternoon.

In reply to a post by dspillett:

I have noticed what appears to be downstream congestion at certain off-peak times in the last couple of weeks, though I've not looked into whether the location of the bottleneck might be within A&A or BT (at the exchange and so forth). If that congestion is within A&A or between A&A and BT then this change will actually be beneficial to me as I can shuffle more transfers to sit in the 0200-0600 window to keep within the units I pre-pay for. Failing that I'll just start filing expenses claims for the things I transfer here for work (where geography and exchange capability limits us to ~2.0Mbit down and 0.8 up on ADSL) until such time as they get the 10Mbit+ leased line I've submitted cost/benefit documents regarding...

We do publish our congestion reports, and we aim to run an uncongested network.
http://aa.net.uk/broadband-speed.html
However, there have been times when our links to BT have been a bottleneck, we do upgrade the capacity on these links frequently though.
Hope this helps.

Theses new prices look a lot more attractive.

Aye, I neglected to post here that I noticed it had arrived an hour or two after my post here. It may even have been winging its way over as I was typing.

When I say I noticed, I don't mean prolonged issues or noticeable packet loss.

I'll keep the reports page booked with my other status report links though. I do like to know what is going on even when I have no power to affect things when there are issues.

The changes may result in me needing to add an extra unit to my regular amount (I'll see how next month goes when the new rates kick in) though I'm pretty sure I can arrange for that to not be necessary.

I can imagine you losing quite a few home-user accounts off the back of these changes, though I'm erring on the side of sticking around myself.

I havent seen an e-mail about this, just checked.

In reply to a post by MattJessop:

I havent seen an e-mail about this, just checked.

Tells you on clueless if you were sent it..

"3 Oct 16:02:24 Emailed [email protected] re Broadband Usage Tariff Chan… [email protected]"

im not sure about all this technical jargon but i was on the 2gb/100gb package so my off night peak allowance getting cut down to 50gb ??

if this is the case time to move on i think

It doesn't *quite* work that way, you don't have a fixed 2G peak quota and a fixed 100G off-peak one. If you use less in peak time, you get a lot more off-peak (so you could currently use 1G peak and 150G off-peak with that number of units).

If you are on a 20CN line then nothing changes anyway.

If you are on a 21CN line (including FTTC) then peak time will start calling off units at 1==2.5Gb instead of 1=2Gb and off-peak will go from 100Gb/unit to 50Gb/unit. It isn't a straight 2.5G+50G though - if you only use 1.0G during week-day days in the month you'll have 1.6 units to use off-peak (80Gb if all used in "normal" off-peak, more if some is used on the over-night cheaper period which is staying at 1000G/unit).

Login to clueless and check the details for you use pattern this month and last couple, that will help you deduce if the change is going to affect you significantly. I have three units now and might need to push that up to four (moving a couple of scheduled transfers into the overnight cheap period means I won't need to go further than that). If you do want to move and are in a fixed contract period, you may want to decide quickly as they are currently waiving early exit fees for people leaving due to the pricing changes.

Edited by dspillett (Wed 26-Oct-11 13:32:25)

In reply to a post by dspillett:

It doesn't *quite* work that way, you don't have a fixed 2G peak quota and a fixed 100G off-peak one. If you use less in peak time, you get a lot more off-peak (so you could currently use 1G peak and 150G off-peak with that number of units).

If you are on a 20CN line then nothing changes anyway........

Actually it does, and for the better too!

From November 1st 20CN customers will now get *1.25 GB* per unit for peak useage. Not seen anything about this here but it is on the AAISP site and confirmed by them over the phone too.

Found link finally:- http://aa.net.uk/news-2011-10.html

Last line in "What Is Changing Exactly".

Edited by Lazza (Wed 26-Oct-11 13:03:55)

Ooh! I can knock a few units off our 20CN site then!

In reply to a post by andrewhearn:

In reply to a post by dspillett:

Would have been nice to be emailed about it (just had a scan through my mail for the last month and I can't see anything).

Just to let you know, we emailed customers that would be affected by this change yesterday afternoon.

Hi Andrew

i am on 20cn and i get 2gig peak and 100gig off peak, will my package change ??

it all seems quite complicated

Many Thanks

It's not complicated at all.

You dont get "2GB peak" and "100off peak", you get x number of units and each unit is worth x amount of bandwidth peak and x amount off peak.

However, if you say you have 2GB peak and 100GB off peak I assume you mean you pay for 4 units (2 units peak @ 1GB/unit = 2GB and 2 units off peak @50GB/unit = 100GB) and you will now get 2.5GB peak and 100GB offpeak.

In reply to a post by pete_thomson:

It's not complicated at all.

You dont get "2GB peak" and "100off peak", you get x number of units and each unit is worth x amount of bandwidth peak and x amount off peak.

However, if you say you have 2GB peak and 100GB off peak I assume you mean you pay for 4 units (2 units peak @ 1GB/unit = 2GB and 2 units off peak @50GB/unit = 100GB) and you will now get 2.5GB peak and 100GB offpeak.

i understand that but according to the clueless page i only buy 3 units p/m so will that mean my allowance will be cut and pay the same monthly fee ?

thanks for your help

If you mostly use your connection off peak (like me), AA have effectively halfed the amount of traffic you can transfer per month. So in effect, you can only transfer half of what you used to be able to, for your 3 units. The price (for myself on 2 units) has also increased by 60p per month, so yours will have also increased by at least this amount (and possibly a little bit more as you are on a 3 unit tariff, not a 2 unit one).

PS - I'm on a 21CN connection.

Edited by mixt (Wed 26-Oct-11 17:23:54)

Hi.
If I remember correctly, on the old system for your 3 units you would have got either 3GB to use during the day or 300GB to use in the evening and at weekends or 3TB to use between 2am and 6am!

Obviously it would have been a mix of the above so maybe you used 1.5GB during the day and 150GB in the evenings adding up to your 3 units.

Now for your 3 units you get either 3.75GB to use during the day or 150GB to use in the evening. So a bit more to use during the day and half as much to use in the evenings.

You should log on to your control pages and look over the last few months to see how you use the data. It may be that you don't need to change anything as you don't get near your current evening allowance.

Worst case is you may need to buy 2 or 3 extra units.

Gary

In reply to a post by gmoorc:

Hi.
If I remember correctly, on the old system for your 3 units you would have got either 3GB to use during the day or 300GB to use in the evening and at weekends or 3TB to use between 2am and 6am!

Obviously it would have been a mix of the above so maybe you used 1.5GB during the day and 150GB in the evenings adding up to your 3 units.

Now for your 3 units you get either 3.75GB to use during the day or 150GB to use in the evening. So a bit more to use during the day and half as much to use in the evenings.

You should log on to your control pages and look over the last few months to see how you use the data. It may be that you don't need to change anything as you don't get near your current evening allowance.

Worst case is you may need to buy 2 or 3 extra units.

Gary

thanks for that

on average we use about 2.5gig through the day and about 40-50gig pm off peak

Result then
Looks like you will be ok without having to buy extra units although you are pretty close.

Just the 60p a unit increase to deal with as mixt pointed out.

Edit...Not sure if it is 60p a unit or 60p for mixt's two units so 90p for you ??

Edited by gmoorc (Wed 26-Oct-11 18:34:18)

Yeah I think it's 30p a unit, so 90p sounds about right.

Post deleted by dethadol

A few people say they did not get an email on this - as Andrew says we have identified the people likey to have to consider an increased tariff and emailed them separately. However the October bill emails included details of this so everyone should have had that email.

Obviously, as usual, as well as email (two emails for some people) it was on the main web page at the time, the news pages, the status pages, the RSS/Atom feed, the irc channel, and twitter as well - plus of course my blog and google+ and facebook. Not sure about usenet. Even so, that was pretty comprehensive...

Edited by RevK (Sun 30-Oct-11 08:05:09)

[censored] if I can find it....

Not with them anymore but if I remember correctly I used to get info on additional pages of the invoice.

Do you have a link for the facebook page?

Their search finds a "you" but that page has just three likes and no information aside from copy+paste from Wikipedia so I suspect it is a automatic creation rather than something you maintain.

(oh, and it also finds Arnold Andrews and an Andrea Arnold, which don't seem right either!)

Though I did get the email, not long after I posted here to say otherwise (in fact it may have arrived before I posted, I don't check my email particularly many times per day)

From the initial page when logging into clueless, click the link that is the line number (not the account name or speed, they go to different pages).

The email, if it was sent because your use makes the changes likely to cost you more, should be listed in the bottom table along with sync/BRAS related messages and notes relevant to faults you may have had investigated.

In reply to a post by dspillett:

From the initial page when logging into clueless, click the link that is the line number (not the account name or speed, they go to different pages).

The email, if it was sent because your use makes the changes likely to cost you more, should be listed in the bottom table along with sync/BRAS related messages and notes relevant to faults you may have had investigated.

Nope nothing there. Bit poor show really, especially as my monthly invoice shows the new price fo £20.00.

I must be one of the ones not on the list as I didn't get an email, just confused by receiving a bill that was higher than last month's with no word of explanation in the email. I think it would have been good to put a note in the invoice email with a link to the news page. Not all of us read the main web page, the news pages, the status page etc etc, but we do all receive the invoice email...

Is there a way to get myself on the list for next time?

Thanks