Switching from Virgin Media cable to Andrews & Arnold over OpenReach FTTP
This started as a post about how I use NixOS to build a router, but the aside on AAISP was getting a little unwieldy. I'll get back to that post another time.
Earlier this year, Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) arrived in my street, and so I took the opportunity to end my 23 year relationship with Virgin Media (previously ntl), the UK's last cable operator standing, and jumped at the chance to switch to Andrews & Arnold (AAISP), probably the nerdiest generally available ISP in the country.
Aside from all the great things I'd heard from others, I knew I was in good hands when I emailed support 30 minutes after placing the order to request a (free) additional IPv4 /30 subnet for a service that wouldn't start until 6 weeks later. I got a reply in under half an hour with my assigned CIDR.
In some ways, one might call the switch a downgrade. With cable I had 1130Mbit/s down, 104Mbit/s up, for £43.52 per month. Now I have 1000Mbit/s down, 115Mbit/s up for £85. So, slower download, faster upload and near twice the price.
What gives?
Well, for one thing, officially the price of the cable package is around £72 per month. Keeping the price down requires invoking the 30-day cancellation period at the end of each 18-month contract cycle, and then waiting for a call a few days or weeks later where they finally offer you the best prices. With AAISP, the price is the price.
And talking of price, at the last negotiation I was paying £40 per month, but then the annual “RPI + a little bit extra for our profit margin” rise kicked in, boosting the price for the remaining 6 months of the contract to £43.52. Illegal in the UK for new contracts from 17th January 2025! VM doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to get aboard that train until it absolutely has to, with the small print on their current offers stating:
Monthly price of Virgin Media’s main services and O2 Airtime Plan will increase each April from April 2025 by the Retail Price Index rate of inflation announced in February each year plus 3.9%.
No such shenanigans with AAISP.
More importantly, I appreciate how transparent AAISP is, right down to the technical details.
There will always be times when things go wrong, but having visibility and honesty in those times makes for a much less frustrating experience. I generally found VM to be pretty reasonable in my area, but occasionally we'd lose service, and half the time the failures weren't even acknowledged, let alone explained.
Let's discuss AAISP features I use, which VM does not offer on their consumer packages.
IPv6
It's just about to tick over into the year of our lawd 2025, and one of the UK's largest ISPs doesn't offer IPv6! Meanwhile, AAISP assigns my account a /48 IPv6 network, from which I'm free to assign multiple /64 and /60 networks to each of my lines, giving me the freedom to assign separate networks to each of my VLANs (a topic for another time).
Multiple IPv4 addresses
I like to self-host a bunch of services. I'd prefer to keep the publicly accessible ones on a separate IP from the bulk of our family Internet usage. I used to do this via a small VPS with Wireguard, now I can do it directly to home, thanks to AAISP offering a free /30 or /29 IPv4 network, even to their home customers, on request. Notably this block is in addition to the fixed primary address.
Failover
AAISP offer a service called L2TP, which gives you Internet access through their network over the top of an existing connection. I used it for a while to get IPv6 for my home network.
It's also included in their standard broadband packages as a backup. In practice this means I've been able to setup a 4G router with cheap prepaid SIM, connected to my main router. Should there be an issue with the fibre connection, an L2TP connection is automatically initiated over 4G, and the IPs associated with my fibre service are now routed over the cellular network, with the attending drop in bandwidth and increase in latency.
Which is really useful when you're using those IPs to host all the things!
Finally, whilst VM is on-paper faster, at least for downloads, the raw advertised throughput to your ISP is not the only metric for the speed of your broadband. The details of their internal infrastructure and peering to the places you want to go will also impact your experience. I got a little hint of this having previously used AAISP's L2TP service, finding that latency to many places (at least measured by ping) was better with their service running over Virgin Media, than from Virgin Media directly!
Subjectively, it does feel like everything is just a little more snappy now. Objectively, measuring the ping times between my home in Bedford to my VPS in Cambridge, I typically saw 15-20ms over cable, and now 5-8ms with fibre. That's around 30 miles, though it's unlikely the actual path is anything close to the line of sight distance. I don't know for sure, but I would guess the technology differences between cable and FTTP are a factor here, in addition to my choice of ISP.
In conclusion, I'm happy to, and fortunate to be able to pay a premium for a quality service from a company with values I align with.
No money was exchanged for this post, except me paying for my broadband.