Thanks for all the help chaps - A&A ought to be switching on our new broadband in a week or so. Sadly, since it's been left inoperative for a few months, BT turned the line off. They would have come and switched it all back on again for bobbins, but we don't want BT, so we're going to stump up three figures for A&A to pay Openreach to do it.
We don't want voice telephony, so we're going to pay for the basic service now and maybe get a proper VoIP phone later.
It's true that A&A are marginally more expensive than the popular ISPs, but the more I read of their site, the more I really like these guys. I'm not much of a geek and I'm no tinfoil-hatter, but even I get a little tinge of happy when I read things like this on their site:
We do not log which websites you visit (though the website administrator may). We don't run any sort of transparent proxies or other systems to covertly log what you do on the internet, and do not sell data to anyone. We specifically monitor traffic levels and make this available to you. If we are helping you debug a problem we can monitor traffic for you in real time, but we don't record that. We also take occasional random traffic snapshots periodically which we hold for 24 hours - this is only to help identify causes of network load problems after the event. All of our servers which you use (e.g. email, web servers, etc.) have logs which are kept for a few months, but you do not have to use our servers if you do not want to. We have not yet been required to retain communications data for 12 months under the new legislation. We do not run anything like Phorm and never will.
We have no so called black boxes to covertly monitor traffic and/or pass traffic monitoring to the authorities or anyone else. Obviously the law is such that we may have to add such black boxes, but we would resist as far as possible. We may even find we are not allowed to change this web page if ever that happens. However, I, as director, am happy to answer direct questions on this matter on irc (user RevK) or on usenet and you can get paranoid if I refuse to.
When you sign up to the user agreement, they make you tick a load of boxes, one of which is:
I understand that by ordering from AAISP I have chosen to opt out of any government mandated filtering, and have asked for a proper, unfiltered internet connection.
Yeah, I'll have a bit of that, please