AA affordable 4G

I could be very interested in the fixed-cost, all-you-can-eat-eat, unlimited data deals that Three offers for 4G. I use AA’s mobile data SIMs already, for 3G/4G. But it’s so ridiculously expensive per byte that it rules out the service for any kind of even modest usage. I was in hospital some years ago and stupidly racked up a £50 bill on AA’s 3G data SIM service in just 24 hours just from downloading a couple of movies.

For occasional use and backup the current service is superb because of the ultra-low standing charges and the fact that it’s so flexible - it’s easy to just turn services ‘on’/‘off’. For example I have ended up with an extra SIM that is currently unused, just sitting in an envelope in my office just now, but it’s not costing me anything and it can just be there waiting, ready for deployment at some point in a future iPad or whatever.

So I wouldn’t want to change anything about the current service pricing setup.

However, an additional option for very heavy users would be brilliant - for fixed line replacement or augmentation. If only AA could effectively do something like reselling the Three unlimited deals. I know it isn’t that simple because the intermediary reseller AQL is involved.

I would be very interested in an expensive heavy usage fixed cost deal for using AA 4G as a much faster DSL replacement, or else being able to pre-purchase bulk data allowances exactly like the ‘units tariff’ that I’m using now for DSL.

I’m not sure if Three is remotely reliable enough and I would be very concerned about the possibility of other heavy users eating up all the bandwidth in the cell, something that would possibly be very unpredictable unless they had a policy of ring-fencing bandwidth share as an option, especially for business users.

Also a couple of things should be fixed.

AA needs to finally get IPv6 over 3G/4G fixed now. Years have gone by and nothing has happened.

For Firebrick users, say, a zero hassle _4G_ USB dongle solution needs to be worked out, with no NAT [censored] and something that just _works_, with your current routed IPv4 and IPv6 address blocks going straight through transparently.

Wobbly half-idea alert: AA would also need to add a flag in clueless to indicate the usage type as ‘always-on’, that is: a link is not to a ‘mobile’ device but to a static location and is always-supposed-to-be-up. So up/down events trigger KCI notifications and get logged in clueless. The link going down when it’s supposed to be a fixed-line replacement is now a very bad thing, not just ‘expected’. (Would have to handle the case of kit being turned off, not route traffic to nowhere over the air in that case.) I need to think a lot more about this.

I suspect AAISP may be worried that the three deal will not survive in the long term, or use of it could be more congested than AAISP is prepared to accept in the future.

The old been here before on both fixed line and mobile deals memory is coming into play.

I use Three's AYCE SIM (on a £20pm Black Friday deal) with AA's L2TP service (£10pm) which gives a cheap unlimited mobile data package along with fixed IP addresses (IPv4 and IPv6). It is a compromise approach but gives the best of each, and it works for me

Or another option is a $5pm Linode virtual machine, with OpenVPN installed on it and that same Three Unlimited data SIM.

This script makes installing the OpenVPN server extremely easy https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

(though it doesn't install it using the most secure setup possible)