Mini-Review from a new AAISP customer

Hello all,

I figured as a happy new customer I'd chip in a little review here, I've already rated AAISP on the main TBB site.

I've been searching for a new ISP for about 6 weeks now. Previously I was with Zen who have been great for pretty much the entire time I was with them, but recently, during peak, throughput has dropped and pings have gone up. The 50GB/month limit was going to be cutting things a little too close for my tastes too, as we're closing one of the 2 ADSL lines coming to the property.

Initially I was a little turned off by the usage structure that AAISP use. The last time I had to deal with peak / off-peak was when I was using dialup, but after sitting and thinking hard about how I actually used the 'net, I realized it was actually a really good idea.

So I requested my MAC from Zen and initiated the migration.

Today, 1 week on from the day I started it, it's complete and I couldn't be happier.

Compared to Zen, pings are lower than they've ever been, and a quick speed-test on the line showed it hitting 100% of what I used to get. FYI, my line is 20CN+ and syncs at the full 8128/832kbps.

The customer portal might be a little intimidating for some, but for me I think it's fantastic to be able to see all the little details here and there about how my line is performing.

As for customer support, well I didn't believe anyone would ever surpass Zen's support quality, but I was wrong. Answers from AAISP have been timely and extremely helpful. I'd like to publicly thank both Mike Cross and Glenn Richardson for all the assistance they gave me getting everything set up exactly as needed.

Bravo AAISP, if this is how everything usually performs you've got a customer for as long as I can afford it!

My experience has been rather different so far. I've been with A&A for 6 days, so far I've had 3 drop-outs (A&A call them BLIPs), total down time is 2+ hours. I left Entanet to escape the ALT, I had 4 or 5 drop-outs in 2.5 years with Enta. But I'm not going back!

Edited by deleted (Thu 22-Oct-09 00:13:28)

I've been hit by both drop-outs this evening, but I'm not at all concerned.

Whether it be ADSL, Fibre links or web-hosting, the 99.9% uptime figure thrown about is always a marketing ploy. Sooner or later things will always go wrong, especially when you're relying on other companies (for example BT). Afterall, "A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link."

Service hiccups will always occur, but I don't worry when they do. Sure it can be inconvenient, but what matters most to me is a company who stands up and states exactly what happened and why, then works on fixing it. Nothing is worse than being with a company that tries to hide these little issues, or unjustly places the blame elsewhere. It makes you feel like you can't trust the people your paying.

In both cases this evening AAISP had a notice on their blog within minutes. They were honest and were clearly working to fix and diagnose the issue. Customer service like that is a rarity these days.

Keep up the good work AAISP ^^

I'm somewhat reluctant to criticise a company who have such dedicated staff but, in the 4 weeks I have been a customer there have been more outages than the entire 4 years I was with BT. Seriously, with BT the PPP session would regularly be up for 100 days without interruption.

I'm beginning to wonder if AAISP are trying to be too smart with all their systems to "work round BT problems". BT don't seem to have all these problems with their own kit.

Edited by deleted (Thu 22-Oct-09 08:20:18)

Agreed, I've just left A&A because of this. I've had a stable connection ever since I first had ADSL but the last month or so was frankly ridiculous to the extreme and I couldn't count how many disconnects my router logs indicated it was that many. I even went back to trying different routers but with no difference whatsoever.

I'm viewing this as a vacation, once A&A can prove they can offer stability through their network and BT's IPSC nodes on 20CN then I would have no hesitation in returning.

These comments have been very useful, as someone considering starting to use AAISP. Much appreciated.

Would you care to comment further on the story behind the outages you wrote about?

I can comment as a customer, based on experience and what AAISP reported on their blog.

The 2 major outages happened on Wednesday. For me both lasted no longer than 10 minutes at most. AAISP have said that the second "blip" was due to a bug in their hardware, which is due to be updated this weekend, but the first seems more likely a BT issue as it affected other ISPs too.

Other than those two, I haven't experienced any other disconnections since then and my line is performing better than it did under Zen.

I'm very glad to have made the move. I'd recommend AAISP in a heartbeat ^^

In reply to a post by CecilWard:

These comments have been very useful, as someone considering starting to use AAISP. Much appreciated.

Would you care to comment further on the story behind the outages you wrote about?

Well there are the quoted ones which can be found on the A&A blog as indicated but also plenty of dropped line ones too. I mean checking back through my email messages (You can set this up on A&A btw for them to email/SMS you every time your line goes down which is very useful but you don't always get one every time the line connection drops it seems as I've kept my own rough records from that & router logs) I was losing connection on average about 8 - 12 times a day come the end ..... really! Firstly using a D-Link DSL-2640B which I'd found fine for a whole year but no go. SpeedTouch 546 *NEVER* drops my line, tried and the same (tried two in fact a v4 & a v6), Billion 5200 I purchased through sheer frustration and renowned as a rock solid router for good sync and not dropping connection .... the same

New ISP (NON IPSC 20CN - i.e. Good ole fashioned BT centrals) for 3 day's and my connection has not dropped once - not one single time ... and my line has always been very stable and all wiring, connections, filtering is as perfect as perfect gets. So there obviously is a problem, but not for all as others seem to have reported just the quoted outages as per the A&A blog.

JM2C - And at the risk of repeating myself yet again, credit where it is due I found AAISP an excellent ISP especially for those with a bit of tech knowledge but since the change from centrals to IPSC nodes well not good at all "for me". I have no hesitation whatsoever recommending them to anybody but I just want something that works and a sync speed and BRAS profile that isn't hanging on it's knees. Try them, it might be fine for you and only a monthly contract too. When BT have finally sorted out the IPSC technology I'm sure I'll return.

Post deleted by Cammy

In reply to a post by Lazza:

. When BT have finally sorted out the IPSC technology

We can but dream.....