Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

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they're only expensive if you're at home 9-5 during weekdays.

I never am so it's £20/month for about 100GB (and effectively unlimited transfer in the early hours of the morning).

they now also offer a flat 50GB at anytime for £25/month.

you're paying extra for for native IPv6, beyond excellent service, an excellent control panel with options most ISPs don't have, as many IP addresses as you want (optionally PI), custom routing (want an AS for your house?), ability to dual bond across different providers, ability to add 3g as backup link, and much more...

they're truly excellent, here's an example of their customer service on IRC:

    1417.59| [bootc] ok, really long shot, but any staff tech around who fancy allocating me some more IPs?
    1418.27| [bootc] I already feel rather greedy but I'm using most of my IPs already :-/
    1423.30| [@AA-Paul] bootc: What login, and what size block?
    1424.14| [bootc] AA-Paul: abc1@a, and a /28 of legacy if possible?
    1424.21| [bootc] for @a.1
    1425.31| [bootc] I then need to re-number internally and expand my /27 sub-division of my /26 to the full /26 :-/
    1426.31| [@AA-Paul] bootc: Done. 1.2.3.4/28 will be routed to you when your router next logs in
    1426.57| [bootc] AA-Paul: many thanks, you're a star! have a great rest of your weekend
    1427.10| [@AA-Paul] No problem. You too :)

(no I don't work for them, but am an extremely happy customer)

+1 for this. Another customer here.

Every time I call, the person on the other end knows their shit straight away.

They managed to un-screw-up my LLU phone service and broadband as well (screw you Telefonica and OpenReach!!!)

They're really cheap for what you get. I pay £45/month for Home::1 which is for me 150Gb + line rental.

O2 for the same was £37.50 dynamic IP and their support staff were fucking muppets.

150GB/month usage?

I often push 150GB in a single night!

That's just greed!

Your house can't have a public AS unless you are going to register it with RIPE, which will also require a second transit provider from a separate network.

I eat through 100GB a month in gaming and netflixing...

Netflix x 4 (we're 4 at home), soundcloud, 1080p youtube, gaming, dropbox, backing up a couple of pc's to the cloud...

I don't like third parties to assume what a normal bandwidth usage is for me. I like my internet uncapped and unthrottled.

> I like my internet uncapped and unthrottled.

Which, for an ISP aiming at a market segment of people like you/us, is a fine way to lose all your lucrative business contracts because it's almost impossible to predict capacity & maintain your quoted contention rates under those conditions. Certainly few home users can afford/justify a totally unmetered uncontended connection at the sorts of speeds[1] we're used to seeing on ISP adverts. The credits/carry over monthly unused capacity[2] is a reasonable middle ground I suppose, although ideally it'd be finer granularity, but then again, would mess with capacity planning, and maybe expose users to serious overage charges without realising.

Whilst it doesn't directly affect your main point, it looks like they only count downstream data, so backups (in the general, non-restore case) wouldn't affect it much.

[Not a customer, although I'd be tempted to if I could afford it (I just checked, and probably can't)]

[1] Maximum speed may be less than quoted depending on your location. Fair Use Policies (We cap/throttle/terminate your account anyway, we just don't tell you about it up-front), Terms of Service (often including not running internet visible servers, and certainly not 25/tcp or maybe 80/tcp even then).

[2] Albeit with "within reason" weasel-words

They don't throttle, though they do have a cap. But when they say "you get this much" you get all of it, without fuckery.

this looked so amazing that I tried to switch from virgin to aa... turns out it's £20/month + £12 line rental / month = £32/month. For Home::1, it's £25/month + £10 line rental / month = £35/month. So I don't agree it's cheap.

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