£100 connection fee for FTTC, but BT is free.

I am very pleased with the ADSL service and connection I have with AAISP. However, when my cabinet is enabled for FTTC (hopefully end of June) I will move to this service.
I have noticed that AAISP charge a £100 connection fee and have download limits, where BT is FREE connection with no download limits. Am i missing something here, as I would like to stay with AAISP, but the BT offer is too good.

I have been through all the above. For what it is worth, I gave BT three opportunities to get things right. First, they were convinced that I was on a LLU connection when I told them that I wasn't. Second, they said that they would not guarantee that I could keep my telephone number on transfer and third they failed to mention 'simultaneous provide' until I mentioned it to them. I pressed ahead and placed an order. It resulted in a number of e-mails annotated Action Required. When I tried to do so, I couldn't. After an hour on the phone to customer services, my will for a quiet life kicked and I have stayed with my present ISP. One e-mail and everything was sorted and delivered as promised. My connection has been rock solid on 40/10 with constant download speeds in excess of 37Mbps. At the end of the day, no one can make the decision for you and there are many happy BT Infinity customers. All I will say is that AAISP to BT is a big jump. Have a look at Zen (no interest as I am not with them). They get good feedback and they have just reduced the FTTC connection charge.

I would go for it. 99% of people have no problems. I just got sky FTTC which was a brand new service. I got it during the trial stages.

Everybody said it wasn't a wise move as anything could go wrong and sky had no experience of the service etc with it being so new. It was fine.

Infinity has great reviews overall

Just noticed that I have been billed to move my line to a new house, it's £106 ! Is that normal, could it have been cheaper?


New broadband installation £58.40
Cease Charge Only £29.69
Internet services £18.00

The pros/cons as I see them (some, all, or none of which may be significant to you):

BT

Pro: "unlimited"

Con: throttling/shaping of some traffic at busy times.
Mitigating factor: if you don't use P2P or a VPN (which may be mistaken as encrypted P2P traffic), you might never experience the effects of this shaping.

Con: I've heard a fair few stories of problems with transferring to BT+FTTC to another ISP

Con: I've heard many many horror stories about BT's after-sales support.

Pro: Lower cost, for setup certainly and depending on your use patter ongoing too (an 80Mbit connection could rack up an expensive bill in peak time!)

AAISP

Con: Explicitly paying for bandwidth used (not "unlimited")

Pro: No traffic shaping at all (aside from the basic QoS priorities needed for IP networks to run generally smoothly, which you'll find done on all networks)

Con: Signup/regrade charge

Pro: I've heard very little by way of problems switching to AAISP+FTTC either from their other product lines or from other ISPs

Pro: I've heard very little by way of problems with their after sales support (when needed which isn't often as they have a reputation for providing a very reliable service). They appear to be very good at chasing BT/OR on you behalf when there is a problem that is in their jurisdiction, and very good at keeping you informed of progress when something is being investigated

Pro: Static IP address should you need that, multiple IPv4 addresses too if you need those

Pro: IPv6 fully supported if that is of interest to you, with a decent address range allocated by default

AAISP tend to pass on the various costs, so the £80+VAT fee that Openreach charge is passed on (though offer of £60+VAT) at present.

BT Retail lock you into a long contract and don't provide any of the options that AA does

AA FTTC is also a 12 month minimum contract. Other than that, I reckon they offer a very transparent FTTC deal and service.

Edited by mixt (Thu 17-May-12 18:11:18)