That's not the news I was hoping to hear about the migration fee, though having done a little more research since my OP it wasn't unexpected

Thanks for the information.

In reply to a post by bubieyehyeh:

In reply to a post by billford:

Yes, I saw that, but £100 is also the cost of a full FTTC install- first row in your first link:

Normal install price of new service and changing from existing no FTTC service

I know AAISP aren't cheap, but charging the same price for a like-to-like migration seems frankly excessive... so my hope was that there are simply some inconsistencies in their website price lists.

I'll wait to see what someone from the company says.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the FTTC install and FTTC-FTTC migration costs from BT were the same.

Migrations are £50 plus VAT whereas install charges are £75 - £80 plus VAT depending on product speed according to the Openreach pricelist.

Edited by deleted (Tue 17-Jul-12 20:46:08)

Do you know how much data you use between 9am to 6pm weekdays (inc Bank Holidays)? Do the math to avoid any surprises.

Yes, I've looked in to that- historically my usage is pretty low, ~15GB/month spread fairly evenly from 9am to midnight, which is my current ISP's (IDNet) peak hours period.

Trouble is, although the total monthly allowance is 150GB, it's only 30GB during peak hours which apply 7 days a week. Although it seems niggardly at first sight it's aimed at a particular customer profile- those whose main priority is low and consistent latency and can schedule their bulk traffic for the small hours.

Because I'm a light user it's suited me fine, but I want to make more use of the on-demand services in future and, although the allowances are likely to be reviewed when the Olympics are out of the way, I don't think the off-peak hours will change and my usage pattern will become an increasingly poor fit with their target customer profile. So I'm looking around, just in case.

I'd start with a basic 2 units peak, 1 unit off-peak and see how it goes. I may have to modify my daytime usage a bit (AAISP's hourly stats will be useful there) and I suspect I'd end up buying a second off-peak unit, but even that comes to less than £40/month, it would be over £100 with IDNet if I used it all

I've been with IDNet for about 7 years of really excellent service and I'll be very sorry to leave (assuming I do), but needs must...

Edited by billford (Thu 19-Jul-12 14:41:27)

Just to note: you don't specifically buy peak and off-peak units, just a total and they are called off by any use. So if you use less peak bandwidth in a given month, you can make up the difference with off-peak use, and vice versa. You'd buy three units, not two peak and one off-peak (the calculator on the website displays it that way as it needs to ask you for the two figures, not because the bandwidth use comes out of two separate pots). You could use 1 peak and 2 off this month, 1.5p/1.5o next, 0.3p/2.7o the next, and so on. If you only use a total of, say, 2.2 this month, the extra 0.8 gets added to next month's quota.

It is effectively counted to the granularity of a byte. A 1000 bytes downloaded uses 0.0000004 units in peak time, 0.00000002 off peak, and 0.000000001 in the really cheap bit between 0200 and 0600 (I've worked those figures out in millions not 1024*1024, they might be counting in GiB not GB (I've not checked) in which case it is ~4.8% better: 0.0000003814697265625/byte rather than 0.0000004 in peak time for example). As with idnet, upstream bandwidth is not currently counted against anything.

If you use very little bandwidth in the working day period on weekdays, as is my case, this works out cheap compared to some other ISPs offerings. And in those months where i do need a chunk more daytime bandwidth the flexibility (units being generic, the month-to-month carry-over/-under) means I don't really have to worry about it. If you regularly use a lot of daytime bandwidth, it can work out quite expensive of course.

Edited by deleted (Thu 19-Jul-12 20:36:20)

In reply to a post by dspillett:

Just to note: you don't specifically buy peak and off-peak units, just a total and they are called off by any use.

Yes, I realise that, but I wanted to keep it simple- I didn't want it to turn into a treatise on all the possibilities, which would probably have exceeded what (I think) is the 64KB limit on post length

But thanks for the detailed explanation- it confirms how I thought it worked, which is always nice .

There's fair bit of uncertainty about my "daytime" use (I'm retired so can be online at any time), IDNet only provide stats for daily figures so it's a bit of a guess on my part. That's why I'll find the hourly stats very useful, and why I suspect I may end up buying an extra unit for a bit of extra flexibility.

Hadn't thought of the GB/GiB differences... maybe an AAISP rep could clarify when they see this?

(I should probably add that AAISP aren't alone on my shortlist- Goscomb Technologies are in the running, and Zen will be if they implement IPv6 before I have to make a decision!)

Looking at the figures on the control panel they are counting in "real" comms/engineering/scientist numbers (1G = 1,000,000,000) rather then programmer's measurements (1G = 1024*1024*1024).

And my numbers above were 1000 out - I've updated them accordingly.

For what it is worth I know a couple of people who are with Zen, Neither of them are heavy users, but they've been happy with the reliability of the service. I joined A&A in part due to good experiences reported by other people, and I've been very happy here thus far.

Edited by deleted (Thu 19-Jul-12 20:38:40)

NetWorX gives you hourly usage.

In reply to a post by jelv:

NetWorX gives you hourly usage.

Not on a Mac it doesn't

But thanks for the thought.

Peek internet usage is around 9-10pm in the UK, so you would expect that to be the expensive time, yet Openreach wholesale prices are the same whatever time of the day or night. Doesn't seem to make much sense.