I’ve changed ISP. We used to be with Zen who were, and remained, awesome. We have recently however changed to Andrews & Arnold.

Due to our location we’re unable to get FTTC, we’re stuck with ADSL. The main reason for the ISP switch initially was A&A could provide us the same service for nearly £10 cheaper. I’m a fan of the smaller organisations and use them over behemoths where possible. Unfortunately the bigger ISPs can go even cheaper than what we pay now but I’m happy to pay more to a smaller company.

Before switching I called up A&A with a few questions, and they answered everything – they know what they’re talking about. I work in IT (though not at an ISP or in networking) and could tell they knew their stuff, and I was only talking to their customer service team. They also sent me a new router (as I signed up for 12 months) which is nice – I had been running on a Draytek 2925n which, whilst generally fine, is a bit old now. No 5Ghz wifi was hampering us somewhat. The new router seems to be good, though I’ve not poked around too much in it just yet. We still don’t get a wireless signal in all corners of the house but I have plans to fix that… eventually.

One cool thing that A&A do is provide access to some quite detailed line status and configuration settings via their Control Pages. I like the openness and control they provide to customers. The static IPv4 address and IPv6 support should be an option from all ISPs by now but frustratingly isn’t. A&A have this as standard at no extra cost.

An upside to switching to A&A is that our average download speed has increased slightly. We used to see 2.5Mbps download with Zen but this has increased to about 2.9Mbps with A&A. We’re still occasionally buffering when streaming (though Netflix is often fine, we’ve had issues with some other online streaming services) though the frequency at which this occurs has reduced a bit.

Overall, happy so far. The line has gone down a few times, which we didn’t really experience with Zen (or notice? I can see when it goes down on their control pages, plus I get an email about it if it’s down for a little while, which is awesome)

I would recommend anyone looking for an ISP to avoid the larger companies and look at either Zen or A&A. You can’t go wrong with these.