If you’re with AA, I think you’d be mad to consider leaving to save a few pounds. It would drive you insane now having to deal with the usual morons in ordinary ISPs now having got used to talking to knowledgable and respectful humans with names.

I can’t imagine it. I’ve been with AA for nearly twelve years and shudder to think about going elsewhere.

FTTP breaks far less often so quality of support is far less of an issue than over xDSL. The CQM running all the time is basically irrelevant too.

I'm sure there will be people who stay where they are even on FTTP but the USP is certainly diminished, expecially with the backhaul network improvements many have made.

You could consider staying as an L2TP customer, for now at least. Then moving to FTTP with AAISP once they get their act together.

That said, I *thought* I was going to go down that route when I went for FTTP with CityFibre/TT but it turns out that I can drop to 800GB/month on my SOHO::1 account by configuring all the heavy users (TV, son's PC for game downloads etc) onto the TT network but keep the web/email/remote access servers which don't really need the bandwidth but do need static IPs on the AAISP connection. That way I basically save the same as the TT subscription making it cost neutral to keep both fibre *and* VDSL which is handy for redundancy, not fully decided but tempted to stick with both at the moment.

Update. My FTTP 330/50 connection went live yesterday. After a lot of soul-searching I have gone for Aquiss. Paying an additional £270 over the course of the next 12 months was the key decision-making factor for me. If things go badly - and I have no reason to think that they will - then paying a termination fee to migrate back to AAISP leaves me no worse off financially.

Funny I'm doing the opposite, I'm moving from Aquiss to AAISP. I've been getting congestion with Aquiss on working days from 9am, not every day is bad, but some days it falls over a cliff. Recent example, the first working day after the Easter holidays speeds at 9am dropped down to a few Meg from 9am, this is on a 900/100 service! BQM attached for a visual of the problem. As I'm working from home, it got to the point I avoided doing anything like video calls around 9-10am as the experience was often not good.

This problem was evident the first working day after joining Aquiss and duly reported. After 4 months of monitoring and raising the issue and finally having CityFibre look into it they reported no fault found. Aquiss have always been responsive, so can't fault that, but on an issue like this they are tied to whatever support CityFibre are willing to give.

I'm sure this problem can't be wide spread with Aquiss/CityFibre as it wouldn't go unnoticed by everyone else, and I'm probably plugged through some overloaded kit with a large number of business customers, if we imagine that perhaps CityFibre prioritise their residential customers below their business traffic then that might explain why I get hit hard on some busy working days. Still CityFibre were not quick to look into it and when they did they are not accepting there is a fault and closed the case. Aquiss have allowed me to leave before end of contract penalty free so at least I can move away.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/16503572597...

Edited by E300 (Thu 28-Apr-22 09:21:52)

For the record, I appreciate the patience shown by yourself.

We have meeting with their TSC due next week with senior members of their team as we want to get to the bottom of this and a number of niggles with their response times currently.

In reply to a post by aquiss:

For the record, I appreciate the patience shown by yourself.

We have meeting with their TSC due next week with senior members of their team as we want to get to the bottom of this and a number of niggles with their response times currently.

An aside, but reading this the thought came to me of the potential future scenario, as and when Virgin Media opens up its network as a wholesale proposition, of a conscientious ISP trying to get some sense out of VM regarding customer connection problems...

In reply to a post by binary:

An aside, but reading this the thought came to me of the potential future scenario, as and when Virgin Media opens up its network as a wholesale proposition, of a conscientious ISP trying to get some sense out of VM regarding customer connection problems...

Personally speaking, CityFibre need to restructure their support teams to support the massive growth of various aspects of their wholesale business. They have got a bit too much Team Leader heavy IMHO, where those on the coal face are light on resources, in some departments. It's not grown at the same rate as the a business as a whole. I know a recruitment drive is currently underway.

In reply to a post by binary:

In reply to a post by aquiss:

For the record, I appreciate the patience shown by yourself.

We have meeting with their TSC due next week with senior members of their team as we want to get to the bottom of this and a number of niggles with their response times currently.

An aside, but reading this the thought came to me of the potential future scenario, as and when Virgin Media opens up its network as a wholesale proposition, of a conscientious ISP trying to get some sense out of VM regarding customer connection problems...

Or more likely around here when CF come along and VM customers realise and leave VM as they want faster upload - the network will get swamped too possibly from the go.

In reply to a post by E300:

if we imagine that perhaps CityFibre prioritise their residential customers below their business traffic then that might explain why I get hit hard on some busy working days.

Which is what I would expect to be the case. I am not on CF (yet) but I would imagine what you say is true - it is a shame but at least your ISP allowed you to leave, that was very decent of them.