looking at moving to Aquiss

HI
currently with Zen, but my contract is up next month, and looking to save a few ££, at the moment Aquiss is doing half price for 6 months and zen are offering £55 per month for the 900mb service, I know what speeds I get and they seem to be full all the time with Zen, but is there anybody on 900mb fttp on Aquiss that can advise me on the peak time speeds they get ?

I'm with Aquiss and I haven't experienced any issues - Speed and latency seem very consistent

See my BQM below

I've just tested at 17:25 on 28th July - 940Mbps down, 111Mbps up (Windows Speedtest.net app)

https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/46841674-0608-...

Edited by ferretuk (Fri 28-Jul-23 17:28:49)

Customer service is top notch, can't fault them whatsoever. They usually resolve any issues through their ticketing system within hours, plus you might even end up with the odd call from their MD who is really helpful.

I'm on the 300/50 package and receive the advertised speeds at all times. Latency is less than half of what it was with Virgin.

I moved to them on the 500Mb package towards the end of Feb this year.

They had some issues which seem to have been with one of their peering links that caused latency spikes and dropped packets that was impacting on calls and stability starting on 5 July through to late afteroon/early evening of 6 July that I think were resolved by whichever provider was having the issue. Not sure if Aquiss ever found where the problem was but Martin was very quick to get in touch with me when I logged at and worked with their suppliers to try and find the cause - maybe they found it or it just resolved itself.

Other than that blip the connection has been rock solid plus you get static IPv4 and IPv6 included in the price which was one of the draws for me (not that I really need it but it was nice to get a BQM up and running after being with BT for 3 years unable to use one at all).

Just been looking at some of the smaller, highly-regarded providers such as IDNet, Uno, AAISP and Aquiss for an FTTP service (as a new installation).

Aquiss's prices seem pretty favourable. Intially Uno caught my eye, but then I saw a 'migration fee' of £100 (for the Fibre Direct Pro product) or £80 (for the Fibre Direct product) applied.

(Somewhat oddly, Uno 's availbility checker only offers the ability to enter a phone number and not an address - presumably if you don't have a working landline you'd need to contact them directly.)

Having seen this with Uno, I'm just wondering if I've missed something with Aquiss? The Aquiss website is pretty clear in stating that there's "£0.00 activation / install".

Any idea who Aquiss use for their backhaul?

In reply to a post by PCJM40:

Any idea who Aquiss use for their backhaul?

BT Wholesale via CityFibre (essentially the old EntaNet provision)

Just to add a clarification, Aquiss is a reseller so they don't have need for any back haul as they white label EntaNet's service. So the ISP is EntaNet, which has now been bought by CityFibre, and customers of Aquiss are identified by IP address as an EntaNet/CityFibre customer.

EntaNet use BT Wholesale for backhaul.

I moved my FTTP to Aquiss a couple of weeks ago, and am very happy. In short, I'd take 300M from Aquiss over 1G with a larger consumer provider any day.

The 300M FTTP service is £45/month with no setup fee, but the first six months is half price, the contract is 12 months, and there's no automatic price rise at end of contract term.

(I was on Cerberus before, who were also pretty good, but the same speed is now £51/month with them, and there's a £48 setup fee)

You're right that it's Entanet's backbone; their address blocks show as "Cityfibre Limited" in he.bgp.net (Cityfibre bought Entanet in 2017).

I can't fault Aquiss' customer service. I raised a ticket before the service went live to request an IPv6 allocation, and it was allocated almost immediately, by Martin himself. It's a proper ticket system with a portal - no need to pick up the phone at all.

When the service was live, I requested IPv6 reverse DNS delegation but there was a problem with Entanet's nameservers. They escalated it to Entanet and it was resolved in a few days.

You get static addresses for both IPv4 and IPv6.

Bear in mind that you don't get a free router, but for me that's a plus as I already have my home network set up the way I want it. On switchover day it was just a case of changing the PPPoE username/password and renumbering my IPv6 networks.

I left Aquiss 18 months or so ago due to congestion problems starting immediately I joined, from 1Gig down to pull less than 100 Meg sometimes and packet loss. This was raised with their supplier (being EntaNet which is the actual service provider) several times over as many months but they couldn't or wouldn't fix it.

Martin from Aquiss was great, he did his best, and in the end I was able to leave my contract early, so I can't fault the customer service, but as good as it was my problem wasn't fixed without me leaving.

I moved to AAISP, and on the day just updated my username and password, so everything exactly the same my end, and bang, congestion issues gone, never to return.

I might have just been in the wrong area via an overloaded switch on EntaNet's network somewhere as you don't see many complaints, but I think if you do have some sort of congestion issue that isn't also affecting their entire estate then the priority given by EntaNet into fixing it is very low.

Edited by E300 (Sat 16-Sep-23 09:36:03)