Broadband pricing

Monthly Exc VAT. See VAT Inc.

Up to:	8Mb/s	8Mb/s	24Mb/s*
Tariff	Std	Prem	ADSL2+
A	£16.16	£26.38	£15.28
C	£22.97	£33.19	£22.94
D	£29.78	£40.00	£28.04
E	£39.99	£50.21	£33.15

Setup £51.06 Full tariff list The package Max *ADSL2+ trial Extra charges

Monthly Inc VAT. See VAT Exc.

Up to:	8Mb/s	8Mb/s	24Mb/s*
Tariff	Std	Prem	ADSL2+
A	£18.99	£31.00	£17.95
C	£26.99	£39.00	£26.95
D	£34.99	£47.00	£32.95
E	£46.99	£59.00	£38.95

Setup £59.99 Full tariff list The package Max *ADSL2+ trial Extra charges

Migrate Bonding CUG Line+ADSL

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UK-wide high-speed broadband internet

You're the expert - who do you recommend?

If you are an IT consultant or IT manager, your clients expect you to know what's best for broadband internet. This page has information about broadband, about how it works, the good points and the bad points, and what makes broadband different if you are trying to sell the idea to your customers.

What is it?

As you probably know - broadband is all about getting fast permanent internet connections to your customers. There are lots of words for it, fast, fat pipe, broadband, but at the end of the day it means that you can transfer data quickly to and from the internet. But fast is not all it is about, the permanent nature of a broadband connection allows your clients to use the internet for trivial things like looking up train times or directory enquiries without any hassle. There is a world of information on the internet waiting for them.

What does ADSL mean?

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line - it's a technology for carrying high speed data on normal phone lines, and BT provide a connectivity service that will connect telephone lines to service providers (like AAISP). It uses high frequency signals that don't stop the phone line working as normal. Connected to the BT exchange is a fast data network to carry traffic to/from a service provider. The service provider then connects to the internet so that the customer gets a fast internet connection. ADSL is available at speeds up to 8Mb/s.

What does SDSL mean?

Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line, much like ADSL. The key difference is that it is the same speed up and down. Also, it uses a dedicated line, rather than being shared with a phone line. SDSL is generally only available at up to 2Mb/s,

What does Broadband mean?

Broadband is actually a radio term, and relates to the way the signals work (over a broad band of frequencies all at once). These days consumers treat broadband as "fast internet".

What's involved?

For ADSL you need a normal BT line. For SDSL, a dedicated line is installed. Within a few days of the order we deliver a router and splitter which you simply plug in to the phone line, and it's ready. We can often provide service within 3 working days, but aim for under a week. Sometimes a line is working next day. Sadly, we can make no guarantee on delivery time.

What sort of speeds are we talking about?

ADSL as a technology allows up to about 8Mb/s on very short distances but it depends very much on the quality and length of the line. BT provide various speeds of service, and they are now starting to offer adaptive services that can go up to 7.15Mb/s (8.128Mb/s line rate). Upload can be up to 400Kb/s (448Kb/s line rate) on Max standard, and up to 750Kb/s (832Kb/s line rate) for Max premium.

This is seriously faster than dialup, even with a 56K modem. Depending on where in the internet you are trying to transfer data from, a 2Mb/s line could transfer over 240K bytes per second, that's 1MB in about 4 seconds. Having that sort of speed available changes your view of the internet and makes it a valuable business tool.

It is possible to use multiple lines to get more out of ADSL and SDSL. We provide services allowing multiple lines for faster speed and higher reliability. With suitable equipment (such as a FireBrick 105) you can use multiple lines to send data to the internet as well.

Permanent...

One of the unsung benefits of broadband is the fact that it can be on-line all of the time. This means you don't have to wait to connect - the internet is just there. With the right sort of ISP and firewall you can have incoming traffic in to your network - allowing email to arrive the moment it is sent and even allowing you to run web pages and servers.

Remote support

If you customer has a permanent fixed IP ADSL connection, then you can get access to their network from your offices easily. Setting their firewall to only allow access from you, possibly with a switch they can control for piece of mind, you can use tools like VNC to access any of their PCs from the comfort of your own office - providing immediate support and help for a variety of problems and offering a better service to them.

Reliable?

Broadband services are getting much more reliable these days. Like any service, they can fail, and we (AAISP) have a number of options to help improve reliability. Using multiple lines at once allows not only greater speed, but also allows for a failure to happen without causing problems.

Increasingly, internet access is seen as an essential aspect of business rather than just a useful extra. Businesses are finding any outage to be a serious problem. You should discuss reliability, and impact of failure with your clients for any service you provide. Even a leased line, which is generally more reliable, can fail. Servic elevel guarantees are not always as helpful as not losing the service in the first place. It is sensible to have fallback plans, even if only to be able to still get your email (such as a dialup modem, or mobile). Having said that, broadband is quite reliable...

We rely on broadband links for our business.

Shared ?

The internet as a whole is a shared service, and always has been. Sometimes the issue of contention is raised with a leased line being 1:1 contention, and broadband lines being less. Thankfully this is becoming less of an issue. From a technical point of view, contention is a very difficult thing for any end user to assess or understand. It is best not to confuse your clients!

Some points on contention:-

• A stated contention ratio only relates to a specific link. The contention of the internet as a whole is not something that makes any sense to try and measure. A broadband link is uncontended (1:1) from the premises to the local exchange. A leased line will be uncontended for from the premesis to the ISP. From there on there is contention in the internet.
• You can't, as a user, measure contention, so you have no way to know if you have what is stated. The fact that you can use your servcie at full speed whenever you want does not mean the "service" is uncontended. Similarly, if someone says 10:1 contention, and you find things slow down, it does not mean it contended more than 10:1. The impact of contention depends on other users.
• A contention ratio on it's own is not a useful figure. It depends on the width of the pipes involved. 10:1 is the same ratio as 10000:1000, but the effect is different.
• There is no point paying for a lower contention ratio on any link, if it is not needed. If the contention is right, then there is always enough capacity. Adding more capacity does not actually make things better. What is "right" depends on the other people using the service.

At the end of the day you have to try the service and see what you think. Not all ISPs are the same. Customers have moved to AAISP and commented that they can't understand why they no longer have an average 200ms latency on their line.

Which ISP?

Well, obviously we are a little biased - you should choose AAISP.. But why ?

There are several aspects of the AAISP service which are helpful to your customer and to you as an IT consultant. On top of which we do pay a small commission.

• We provide a block of real IP address. In fact we can provide multiple blocks. This means you can put your customers on fixed IP addresses. It means you can allow access to their machines from your machines for support issues, and can set up mail servers, and all of the benefits of being a real part of the internet. It also makes it very easy to set up inter office networks. Not Virtual Private Networks, but Real Networks - what the internet was actually meant for in the first place (taking care to use firewalls, obviously).
• We constantly monitor all lines. We can often pro actively deal with faults, and spot core network faults long before BT. We have a tenacious faults department that do not take no for an answer when getting BT problems resolved. We have no bullshit technical support and expect the same from our suppliers such as BT.
• We supply a preconfigured broadband router to simply plug in and use - no setting up required. We include an easy to use information pack with a clear picture of how to connect the router.
• We don't limit IP addresses. Some ISPs will offer fixed IP, but only 8 or 16. We allow whatever you can justify under RIPE rules, and one IP per PC is no problem. Bear in mind that with voice over IP starting to make serious inroads, having fixed IP addresses will make it possible to simply have IP phones on desks and call them across the internet. IP phones are just one small use of fixed IP addresses. Fixed IP also eliminates lots of problems with NAT, and firewalls in the future.
• We don't have hidden proxies. Some ISPs save bandwidth costs by hijacking all web page access and running it via a proxy. This can cause all sorts of problems and some are better than others at what they do. We are of the opinion that we are supplying and internet service - we allow you to send and receive packets and we do not get in the way of that.
• We do allow incoming traffic and servers. Some ISPs do not want you to run servers, whether web servers or email servers or anything else. Again, our view is we are providing an internet service, and you can run whatever servers you like (within the law!).
• We do not block any ports or protocols. There is nothing worse that trying to track down a problem with some system to find its the ISP that's blocking some port or protocol. With our service you can send and receive any IP protocol - including IPSec, GRE, and so on - so setting up a VPN, if you want one, is easy.
• We know what we are talking about. We are not a massive faceless corporation, but we have a no bullshit technical support policy. If our staff don't know they will tell you and try and help you find the answer. They have backing of experts - the owner of AAISP actually wrote the FireBrick firewall IP code from scratch and runs IP training courses, so the company has technical knowledge at the steering wheel.
• We are flexible. We don't stick strictly to specific packages. We have home customers with 256 address blocks. We have customers with multiple domains. We have customers running their own DNS. We don't mind. You can take over as much or as little of the operation of being an ISP as you like. For some people we just route packets, and for others we run webs sites, email boxes, domain names, and everything. It's up to you. We have options for you to run a virtual ISP if you like.
• We can provide ISDN dialup with fixed IP and ETRN to any mail server you like - ideal as a backup in case or problems even if we don't supply your email service. We can route the same IP addresses over dialup, making it perfect as a backup.
• A lot of small IT consultants are installing linux based systems, but finding an ISP that understands linux is not easy. We use linux extensively in our business so we can help. Obviously we don't mind if you use linux, Mac, or Windows.
• We have bandwidth to back up our service. We have multiple gigabit links to transit in the internet, lots of direct peering (including people like the BBC) and spare capacity into BT.  Often we have many times the capacity we need as we plan ahead. It's still a shared service and should not be abused, but we make sure the service is there and fast when customers need it.
• We will delegate reverse DNS - which many ISPs will not. Alternatively we have simple web based admin to allow you to manage reverse and forward DNS entries.
• We can bond downlink and accept bonded uplink (e.g using a FireBrick) on multiple broadband lines to provide faster and more reliable service.
• We even provide IP6 addresses for any forward thinking customers - all at no extra cost. This is over IP4 tunnels or natively on broadband. This is just one of the areas where we are looking to the future and providing a technically competent service.
• We have our own R&D department working on leading edge developments to keep us at the forefront of technology.

We believe that by offering a real internet connection, quickly and efficiently, we can offer a service that is ideal for IT consultants to recommend to their customers. Talk to us now.

Who uses AAISP?

We have all sorts of people with a mixture of business and home users as well as schools and many churches! One of the largest companies in the world use us for field engineer's broadband lines. We even have key players in linux development who choose our services for their home use. Lots of small IT consultants use our service for their clients. We aim to be the first choice for the technical and professional internet user, at home or at work.