I recently moved flat in London, and I was quite reluctant to give up Hyperoptic as my ISP. My new flat only has a VDSL line and so I went with Andrews & Arnold, the UK ISP renowned for calling IPv4 the “legacy Internet” and refusing to implement censorship technology.

This was a good move.

Internet service

I’ve got a public IPv4 address and a /64 on IPv6; their account gives me a /48 should I so need it. I also get unfiltered, un-censored Internet access, and 2TB per month of traffic. This costs me £60 per month which is a fair bit more than other “competitive” ISPs.

The service was installed by a BT OpenReach engineer which is standard across most UK ISPs.

Online accounts

AAISP really start to shine in their online accounts. Firstly, every account has 2fac via Google Authenticator. Secondly, they have separate accounts for billing and line configuration.

Data insights

There’s some nice graphs: certainly more detailed than my DD-WRT router gives me:

Detailed bandwith graphs

I get emailed whenever the line goes down:

Notification upon connection drop

I can see the logs from the server(s) hosting their end of the connection:

        
2019-03-15... clueless bgpfeed: aa00@a Route 42.42.42.42/32 now 44.44.44.44
2019-03-16... clueless bgpfeed: aa00@a Route 42.42.42.42/32 now down
2019-03-16... clueless radius-acct: FTTC0000000 Stopped [email protected] UserRequest
2019-03-16... clueless radius-auth: NMANPG eth 0/4/15:101@FTTC0000000 Platform 44.44.44.44 43.43.43.43#4095 [email protected]
2019-03-16... clueless radius-auth: FTTC0000000 TT Accept [unknown-lns] 43.43.43.43#48490 [email protected] d.gormless Via=TT TCP-MRU-fix linerate=68497000/19999000 adjust=67241449(98.167%) MTU=1492
2019-03-16... clueless bgpfeed: aa00@a Route 42.42.42.42/32 now 46.46.46.46
2019-03-16... clueless radius-acct: FTTC0000000 Start [email protected] 43.43.43.43 d.gormless 21-E TT linerate=67241449/19999000 tcp-fix MRU=1492 I/F=00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00
Detailed (redacted) server logs about my connection

The most fascinating piece of the line admin page for me is the log of the line’s transfer from the previous tenant’s provider. Every message between A&A, BT, TalkTalk and me is logged and is available:

        
Print/send information pack
Check address - may need creating Correct address needs entering
...
Track PSTN order 0-0-000000000000 Message: Informational 510 Order Acknowledged
Track PSTN order 0-0-000000000000 Message: Status: Matched
Track PSTN order 0-0-000000000000 Message: Status: Committed
Note TalkTalk order ref: 000000000 has entered PlanningDelayed state
Sent KCI email <email> Your broadband internet service order at <postcode> is expected to complete by end of 27th Feb 2019
Test line called (N)
...
Tx rate (adjusted) 67925673 to 67702834 (rx 19999000)
Sent KCI email <email> 2019-03-13 02:43:29 Line down (LostCarrier)
Sent KCI email <email> 2019-03-13 02:44:55 DSL line up (down 86 seconds)
A few sample logs

Other features

Regular scans to ensure I'm not running reflectable DNS servers
I can create a network traffic dump to debug issues
I can edit the RIPE entries for my IP ranges
Buttons!

Summary

All in all I’m very impressed with A&A: as well as all the fancy buttons and graphs and logs that make software people feel happy, the internet pipe is absolutely stable: there’s no 8pm bottleneck to be seen.