Slashdot Mirror

Andrews & Arnold would be my guess. Though I'd prefer to describe things like rDNS delegation as something that any non-crap ISP will do, rather than geeky extras...

In my experience of dealing with a lot of different ISPs for customers is that almost none of them know that rDNS can be delegated, and when you eventually manage to get through to a third line engineer and explain to them how it works and point them at the RFCs, you eventually get told that their internal systems aren't set up to allow it, so no.

Its a pretty sad state of affairs.

Andrews & Arnold would be my guess. Though I'd prefer to describe things like rDNS delegation as something that any non-crap ISP will do, rather than geeky extras...

"This is why ISPs..."

Oh, what bullshit. ISPs have bent over backwards so they don't lose out on delicious government contracts, which in the UK require satisfactory filtering methods in place.

There are maybe one or two ISPs which have had a backbone in all this - such as Andrews&Arnold. You can tell the difference because their Internet service is 100% unfiltered. They even ask you if you want filtering and refuse to provide you with service if you say "yes".

Not all ISPs

Not only is Andrews & Arnold XKCD 806 compliant, but they meet all of mumsnet^W David Cameron's censorship requirements.

The government wants us to offer filtering as an option, so we offer an active choice when you sign up, you choose one of two options:-

Unfiltered Internet access - no filtering of any content within the A&A network - you are responsible for any filtering in your own network, or
Censored Internet access - restricted access to unpublished government mandated filter list (plus Daily Mail web site) - but still cannot guarantee kids don't access porn.
If you choose censored you are advised: Sorry, for a censored internet you will have to pick a different ISP or move to North Korea. Our services are all unfiltered.

Is that a good enough active choice for you Mr Cameron?

I would say most, otherwise I'd be able to take my ISP to court for fraud. Their other page is worth a read too.

I would say most, otherwise I'd be able to take my ISP to court for fraud. Their other page is worth a read too.

Why would any company turn down such as easy way to make money that requires virtually no effort on their part.

"we provide Internet access without monitoring and filtering as is our protected right under EU law."

And that's just one ISP of many that have such a policy.

Perhaps you should write to them and ask them which they feel morality usurps profits?

When you talk of reliability and mentioning that calls are routed over voice gsm you are not comparing like for like...

Skype is Skype. It's called Skype on my phone, the application is called Skype and on the phone bill, the calls are called "Skype" (where it shows there are no charges). When, someone tells me, use "SIP", that's fairly specific.

For instance, see:
http://aaisp.net.uk/kb-telecoms-sip2sim.html (aaisp resell the service of 3 i believe, not sure if 3 will deal direct to a single customer)

I have to pay for that. Don't have to pay for Skype. I see no advantage in it over what I have. So, I don't want it.

Seems a fairly desperate way to get subscribers, considering no other provider offers such a service... Once they are established you can expect to see this loss leading service either go away entirely, or start costing.

I don't understand the problem? This is the best choice right now. If it's no longer the best choice, I will stop using it. I don't use something because it's a name.

Also if they offer free services, there will be a lot of users who exclusively use the free services and never pay for anything at all. This inflates the market share and subscriber numbers, but is otherwise damaging to the bottom line as these customers are a cost rather than a revenue source.

Again, this has nothing to do with my best choice of options at this moment. At the moment there is no SIP provider, providing what I get.

You can expect the free services to be dropped just as soon as paying customers need the capacity.

I expect nothing but change. I don't assume anything will last forever.

When you talk of reliability and mentioning that calls are routed over voice gsm you are not comparing like for like...

Three actually provide a similar product for SIP, that is any calls you make in the normal way on the gsm handset are transparently routed to a SIP server of your choice...

For instance, see:
http://aaisp.net.uk/kb-telecoms-sip2sim.html (aaisp resell the service of 3 i believe, not sure if 3 will deal direct to a single customer)

No client necessary, any standard cellphone works.
I think the service is mostly aimed at business users, where your cellphone can integrate totally with the existing sip based pbx.

This service is as reliable as your telco and your voip provider, and seeing as there are multiple sip providers vs one skype provider you remove a single point of failure with sip and can choose a provider based on their reliability, or switch if they're not up to it.

They get subscribers who inevitably pay for more services through them. Such as when I purchase temporary Internet access when traveling.

Seems a fairly desperate way to get subscribers, considering no other provider offers such a service... Once they are established you can expect to see this loss leading service either go away entirely, or start costing.

Looking at the stats:
http://www.telecomsmarketresearch.com/resources/UK_Mobile_Operator_Subscriber_Statistics_2.shtml#EE_subs

Three are growing, but still have the smallest market share of any of the major operators. Setting up a telco is a huge investment in infrastructure, so its likely to be quite some time before they are able to break even. Also if they offer free services, there will be a lot of users who exclusively use the free services and never pay for anything at all. This inflates the market share and subscriber numbers, but is otherwise damaging to the bottom line as these customers are a cost rather than a revenue source.
Also low market share results in unused capacity, so the costs of giving away some of that capacity for free are significantly less than if the free users were depriving paying customers of capacity. You can expect the free services to be dropped just as soon as paying customers need the capacity.

As that's what I've had since I went ADSL2+. Any significant increase in this will mean my ISP will hound the telco until they fix it, because they actually give a shit.

We have resellers in many countries, and sure you can buy QoS as a value added service on your MPLS line from any decent telco, but none of the ISPs I have ever heard of provide QoS on ordinary public internet ADSL lines. If you can point me towards just one ISP that advertises DiffServ or similar tag based QoS on their public internet ADSL lines

I imagine A&A will do this for you. I'm aware that they do QoS on customer DSL as standard but don't know the specifics. Similarly, I believe even cheapo ISPs, such as PlusNet, do some level of QoS, but good luck getting any detail of exactly what they do.

But if protocol designers at Google (and elsewhere) work under the assumption you just described (roughly paraphrased: "latency sensitive applications do not belong in non-QoS networks") we can all wave goodbye to Skype

Frankly, as far as I care, Skype can indeed go to hell.

However, the solution to this is not to just shove latency sensitive traffic over a non-QoS network and hope that other applications are playing nice (on an internet where very few applications actually seem to bother to follow RFCs, it seems ridiculous to me to expect an application to interact well with other applications in a situation where there are no standards!). The solution is to choose your ISP according to your requirements. For the most part, congestion happens on the links between the ISP and the end user, and this is something the end user can control. If you need VoIP, or other another latency sensitive application, go find an ISP that will accommodate you, rather than expecting the cheapest, most clueless ISP you can find, to be suitable. You _can_ get away with VoIP on a quiet non-QoSed ADSL, but expecting other protocols to restrict what their abilities because you're too cheap to get a decent connection seems silly.

Clearly you're unaware that quality ISPs actually do exist. I use A&A nothing shit about them and worth every penny. In fact they're not even that expensive.

Bandwidth costs money, an ISP has to have caps which realistically keeps overall usage to a level which the ISP can sustain with a given number of customers. If they don't and are offering "unlimited data" then they are over-subscribing their lines, lying or both. They can also over-subscribe their lines by simply selling their service to more customers than they can manage.

Obviously it can then be "managed" by traffic management, blocking protocols such as p2p etc but no-one likes these measures (especially here). I don't like them and I pay for an ISP that manages their data capacity honestly with caps and you buy bandwidth. It costs more, but it's worth it for me and they keep stats that show the number of unerrored seconds and buy capacity to keep up rather than traffic manage.

There is no such thing as "unlimited data" - period.

Exactly. Anything unlimited is ultimately a low quality service because they don't care if you get the advertised speeds.

Speeds are listed as upto in Ireland to get around this. Upto 7Mbps meaning you might get 3 if you are lucky. Unlimited data means you get a warning when you download more than an unknown amount they won't tell you.

My ISP is unlimited and not gotten any warnings yet but don't use it for that much. A 7Mbps line which isn't over subscribed due to this ISP's being unpopular in the area. They block P2P but you can get around such restrictions usually.

Others in areas where it is over subscribed get much lower speeds and get warnings when they download over 30GB a month which is a crazy low cap for an unlimited service.

The whole industry suffers from lack of regulation to force transparency when selling the product so customers are mislead into thinking they are buying something they are not. irelandoffline.org is a good website for anybody interested in reading up on the issue in Ireland which seems to be quite similar to the American problem.

Bandwidth costs money, an ISP has to have caps which realistically keeps overall usage to a level which the ISP can sustain with a given number of customers. If they don't and are offering "unlimited data" then they are over-subscribing their lines, lying or both. They can also over-subscribe their lines by simply selling their service to more customers than they can manage.

Obviously it can then be "managed" by traffic management, blocking protocols such as p2p etc but no-one likes these measures (especially here). I don't like them and I pay for an ISP that manages their data capacity honestly with caps and you buy bandwidth. It costs more, but it's worth it for me and they keep stats that show the number of unerrored seconds and buy capacity to keep up rather than traffic manage.

There is no such thing as "unlimited data" - period.

Last time I was bitching about the IWF's lack of transparency here, someone pointed out AAISP as one ISP that doesn't subscribe to the IWF list. Unfortunately if I want more than 2Mbps, I have to use cable, so not an option for me.

ISPs aren't required to implement the IWF blacklist unless they want to provide services to the government. Individuals are free to use an ISP that doesn't implement the blacklist, such as AAISP.

I've just had a couple of days off work with a nasty virus, and even with my head full of cotton wool I had a play with setting my Netgear DG834 into "Modem only" mode (via the hidden page http://192.168.0.1/mode.htm) and running RP-PPPoE on my linux server. I managed to get it up running IPv4 pretty quickly. Now all I need to do is wait for my ISP to start supporting IPv6. Unlike Andrews and Arnold who have been running IPv6 for ages, they don't think it will be a concern for some considerable time. Don't they understand that some of us want to start seeing if things work and gaining experience right now?

Another funny thing...

BT, the UK's largest ISP does not support ipv6 because of a bug in their Cisco hardware. Cisco seems to be trying to prevent ipv6 adoption at every level.

> How many isps or carriers now are giving ipv6 as an option

Some ISPs of which I know:

Free.fr in France
AAISP in the UK
XS4All in the Netherlands

And those are just those with which I have had personal contact.

Most academic networks such as HEANet and Janet are also fully-v6.

They are already keeping logs of all your internet access for a minimum of 6 months within the EU. Many countries including Britain happily require that the logs be kept even longer.

Can you provide a reference to that requirement?
My ISP doesn't keep any logs: http://www.aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband-realinternet.html

These UK ISPs have quite a lot of that list covered.

Although the UK's situation, as far as broadband goes, is not perfect, the incumbent telco (BT) is at least forced by the regulator (Ofcom) to act as a wholesaler. Any ISP can provide service over BT's phone lines and backbones.

They have a pretty straight forward price/usage calculator. I'm fortunate enough to be on the 21CN. To my mind, if Internet access is a core requirement of a business isn't is worth paying for the best level of service?

Except that what is shown when you visit the A&A prices page (when you eventually find it) is the 20CN allowances that is available to everyone, not the 21CN ones that only half the country can get. So it's 1GB and 50GB.

Not true. I get IPv6 straight out of a PPPoE connection (would be PPPoA if my ADSL modem/router supported IPv6). This is via Andrews & Arnold and costs £18 pcm.

My ISP already has native IPv6 support as well as tunneled and a 6-to-4 gateway. Head of ISP suggested "Internet HD" as a branding scheme to increase general IPv6 take-up the other day! For reference my IPv4 vs IPv6 traffic ratio is about 20:1, which isn't as low as I expected.

I don't know how it is in other parts of the world but here in the UK, I don't know of any way of instructing telecoms providers to not route calls that have Calling Line ID withheld

Unsurprisingly, this particular company Andrews and Arnold, do offer it (and have done for years)
http://aaisp.net.uk/kb-telecoms-sip.html (Under 'incoming features' - "ACR: You can set your number to reject calls where the calling number is withheld. The caller gets a suitable message and are not charged for the call.")
So all you need is a standard VoIP phone and their £1 a month VoIP service and you're off.
Their service is currently undergoing open beta trials with mobiles too - http://aaisp.net.uk/telecoms-mobile.html

I don't know how it is in other parts of the world but here in the UK, I don't know of any way of instructing telecoms providers to not route calls that have Calling Line ID withheld

Unsurprisingly, this particular company Andrews and Arnold, do offer it (and have done for years)
http://aaisp.net.uk/kb-telecoms-sip.html (Under 'incoming features' - "ACR: You can set your number to reject calls where the calling number is withheld. The caller gets a suitable message and are not charged for the call.")
So all you need is a standard VoIP phone and their £1 a month VoIP service and you're off.
Their service is currently undergoing open beta trials with mobiles too - http://aaisp.net.uk/telecoms-mobile.html

> He made the mistake of presuming that the circuitry inside would
> be no bigger than the effective external contact area.

Not really a presumption considering that some operators actually mark the micro-SIM cutting lines for you:

http://aaisp.net.uk/i/sim.png

Do something about it, you are a customer after all. (Assuming you have a choice about which ISP you give your business to, and aren't in some horrible monopoly situation)

i) Complain to your ISP, ask them why they don't support IPv6
ii) Threaten to switch to an ISP that does support IPv6
iii) Actually switch to an ISP that supports IPv6, and tell your old ISP why you are moving.

Companies will listen to their wallets, if nothing else.

and yes, my ISP supports IPv6 native & tunneled and has a 6to4 gateway if you don't want to dual-stack

For subscribers, that's true. Not for communications providers, though. Yesterday's /. story has some additional discussion.

To continue their geek cred, they also offer the potential for a complete IPv6 native stack *without native IPv4* by offering 'a DNS resolver that provides fake responses for any host that has an IPv4 address but not an IPv6 address, and a gateway that maps those fake IPv6 addresses in to the IPv4 world': http://aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband-ipv6-nat64.html It works, and it works well. No more DHCP.

Since this ISP charges for bandwidth (and quite heavily during the day) and are more expensive than other providers that supply truly unlimited tariffs such as BeThere, I fail to see how "pirates" can be "their best customers"

Since his ISP claims full IPv6 support I assume he's got it working. (A whois on his IP gave the ISP.)

Try Andrews & Arnold. They've said they won't do IWF filtering. They've also recently issued a statement on the DE Act to say they'll follow it to its technical letter, but so far as possible they'll work around its intention and keep customers online.

Really must go support them with my money - soon as I can take the time hit of switching ISPs.

I lived in a VM cable area for two years now, I was perfectly happy with Virgin until the DPI rollout. To be fair at least they told us about it unlike BT. I have always got the speed I was promised, if you could find a server fast enough to fill the line. And as far as caps go, they where also clear about it and even upgrade the cap or turn it off when possible.

But DPI was the last straw for me. Most of the other things where technical problems to do with networking, DPI is not, It is spying for the sake of greed and puts the cost on to us customers, who don’t need it for any reason.

So when I went to cancel my service, I was told that I would have to finish my contract with them or pay off the rest of the contract!!!. After a few emails and calls I gave up, only had three months left. I still think it is outrages that they will not let me go, since they are the ones that broke the contract with me.

Now I am off, back to ADSL land. At least I can switch providers if they start using DPI.

Been looking at some of the LLU in my area. It looks like it might be better to stick with the devil I know.

I like the look of these guy’s http://www.aaisp.net.uk/.
But with my usage it would cost a fortune.

it's now a legal requirement that ISPs log all IPs. And all e-mail headers.

My ISP disagree

My ISP, Andrews & Arnold, support IPv6.

I don't use it, though. I have enough IPv4 addresses for my boxes here. Very few routers which can handle IPv6 can handle ADSL2+ well. 21CN is not architected for IPV6, either; they're trying to make it work, but BT aren't making it easy.

A&A have categorically stated that they will *never* filter (unless it's made compulsory, and even then they'd try to find a way around it eg. by selling their lines as business broadband instead of consumer).

http://aaisp.net.uk/news-censorship.html

First, how the fsck are you going to explain this to end-users, who are just starting to get their head around the concept of "bandwidth"?

My end users historically have been much, much bigger than most end users (SMEs down to households), and manage to have people working there that understand these things. Not that they necessarily like the idea... "too different!" On the other hand, the hosting market has players in which this type of model would not be at all alien.

Surely the goal of most ISPs is a stable (or slightly increasing) recurring income, so the pricing will initially match the current all-you-can-eat deals. On the other hand, many ISPs, especially outside the USA, are already in a market where there are few all-you-can-eat offers, and fewer still of them are honest. (Even inside the USA, it's pretty clear that all-you-can-eat really means "up to a limit, which you probably don't know until you reach it and are throttled").

In many markets the formula is along the lines of this one, which I choose because it is an especially clearly presented policy (and written in English, rather than Swedish or something): http://aaisp.net.uk/newubc/details.html

Note that this ISP only charges for Internet->enduser traffic.

The "Put Simply" part is equally applicable to a usage based charging system that charges for enduser->Internet traffic instead.

So, no, I don't think it's difficult to introduce into a market like the one AAISP competes in because of complexity.

Second, charging only for upstream would tend to make it more expensive to run a home server, and is certainly biased against torrents and the like

A roll-out is likely to want to avoid changing the recurring costs seen by the vast majority of users, including the busy ones. Moreover, there is no structural reason why changing from a pay-by-byte-downloaded (including deals with prepaid thresholds and surcharges for each GByte beyond that) to a pay-by-packet-sent would in itself lead to a usage shock.

It is very likely that a busy downloader will end up paying exactly the same amount, because the packet count will not change very much. (A busy downloader is mostly ACKs).

A busy uploader who is also a busy downloader is also not likely to see much change, since again, the packet count is pretty symmetrical.

A busy uploader who only uploads and so is basically transmitting full MSS sized TCP segments all the time, is also unlikely to see much change in her bill, and a busy uploader can save money by using path MTU discovery, preferring peers which advertise large MSSes (which sadly is only announced in SYNs), and use the best congestion-avoiding TCP implementations available. Such a busy upload-dominant user probably already knows how to tune some of these settings already.

Moreover, the "dirty not so little secret" of retail ISPs is that their heaviest P2P sharers are most likely to upgrade to newer and faster packages, and heavy availability of goodies (well-connected heavy P2P sharers) is a significant reason why occasional downloaders (i.e., 30-50% of all users) upgrade.

You do not want to scare away heavy uploaders, you just want them to play nice in the sense of not introducing congestion. Charging per packet sent is a good incentive to play nice. Note: it's not charging per byte but per packet, so as to encourage the use of bigger packets, which in turn means less overhead per bulk transfer, which means less bandwidth consumed per bulk transfer, which is good.

You also want heavy uploaders to serve your customers first, then your peers (in the sense that money is not changing hands), then remote destinations (reached through paid long-haul/international transit). Heavy uploaders are likely to want to take advantage of discounts for packets sent to the first two types of destination. This actual

Do you have a reference for that?
My isp http://www.aaisp.net.uk/ has not been forced by the government to do any such thing.

So would you be happier with: "25 gigaoctets (25 x 10^9 bytes) per month inclusive of all framing and header overheads with a maximum speed of 4 Mbps (4 x 10^6 bits), inclusive of all framing and header overheads"?

Contract law in England and Wales has considered this point, as has the market, and the result is service offerings along these lines. Here is an example in unusually plain English.

If the truth and clarity are what you are after, it's going to be along these lines. However, a variety of forces (not just large ISPs, although in the USA they are exceptionally bad at market segmentation, perhaps deliberately in a bid to stymie cherry-picking competition) in the North American market causes this to be downplayed a lot, to the point of concealing the "25 Go/month" figure.

Most users don't need the kind of service which slashdot users expect. If users are prepared to pay more, there are options for them - AAISP is one example. However the vast majority don't want to pay more than around £15-£25 ($30-$50) per month which (given the margins involved - BT take £8 per line and then wholesale bandwidth at what works out at around £.90 per GB IIRC) simply doesn't allow the ISPs to provide a decent amount of bandwidth.

When it comes down to it, they'd rather have 150,000 customers paying £15 and using 500MB per month than 10,000 customers paying £30 and complaining that they get shaped at 30GB.

I use Andrews and Arnold - http://www.aaisp.net.uk/. They give you 8-16 static IPv4 addresses for free, support IPv6 out of the box, are very reliable, and even text (SMS) me when the line goes down. They have lots of latency and loss tracking web reports, and online fault tracking, status blog, etc. Their techie-oriented page mentions some more nice features: URL:http://www.aaisp.net.uk/tech.html.

Most importantly, you can get through to a real techie in about 30 seconds typically if you have a real problem. I'm on a usage-based tariff (unfortunately very common in UK) but this only applies during working days, not after 6pm or weekends, so I never go over 2 GB (don't do music/video stuff during the day).

A colleague switched from Pipex to Andrews and Arnold and is quite impressed with them. And no, I don't get commission or own shares etc :)

Andrews & Arnold (http://www.aaisp.net.uk/) have been excellent for me. IPv6, as many IPs as you need, excellent customer service, free domain with a standard ADSL account, unlimited downloads in the evening, IMAP/POP/webmail access with antispam & virus. I've been with them for a few months now and they have been by far the best ISP I have come across in the UK. They do limit usage during the day (I'm on 1GB a month during 0800-1800 Mon-Fri), but over usage is charged in small increments, should you go over it. I'm a pretty heavy user, and I've still not managed to hit my usage limit. If you look on the web site they have an IRC channel where users and staff are happy to help out and answer any questions about the service.

Try Andrews and Arnold. I've had IPv6 (via a tunnel from their network) for the last two years with them. Native IPv6 (without a tunnel) is integrated into the new router they are developing, and should be live by the end of the year (only problem is finding an ADSL router that will support it, but you can use an ADSL modem and Linux, for example).

I like the policy of my current ISP Andrews & Arnold (UK).

You have full access, with real IPs for all your machines, and no restrictions on running servers.

If they get any abuse reports you have 3 strikes - first and second report they'll e-mail you. Third report they'll kill your connection, and call you up to let you know what happened.

It's then up to you to fix the problem before they reconnect you.