We have been notified of the below planned maintenance window affecting some BE DSL connections:

DOWNEND 

FISHPONDS 

WINTERBOURNE 

FROME 

WARMINSTER 

TROWBRIDGE 

MELKSHAM 

KINGSMEAD 

COMBE DOWN 

KINGSWOOD 

BITTON 

NORTH 

WESTBURY-ON-TRYM 

AVONMOUTH 

CLEVEDON 

NAILSEA 

PORTISHEAD 

CALDICOT 

CHEPSTOW 

CHIPPING SODBURY 

THORNBURY 

WORLE 

EASTON 

EASTVILLE 

FILTON 

HENBURY 

WEST 

STOKE BISHOP 

SOUTH 

BISHOPSWORTH 

MIDSOMER NORTON RMCUX 

RADSTOCK 

STROUD 

HARDWICKE 

CHELTENHAM 

BISHOPS CLEEVE 

BARNWOOD 

CHURCHDOWN 

We have been notified of the below planned maintenance window affecting some BE DSL connections:

NEW SOUTHGATE

MUSWELL HILL

NORTH FINCHLEY

POPLAR

TOTTENHAM

DEPTFORD

KENTISH TOWN

KINGS CROSSCLLOW

HENDON

HOUNSLOW

BLOOMSBURY AKA HOWLAND ST

HAMPSTEAD

LORDS

MAIDA VALE

MARYLEBONE

PRIMROSE HILL

SOHO AKA GERRARD STREET

SOUTHBANK

We have been notified of the below planned maintenance window affecting some O2 DSL connections:

Date - 09/05/2013

Exchanges affected:

Woodford (LNWFD)
Walthamstow (LNWTH)
Eastleigh (STEASTL)
Bishops Waltham (STBISHW)
air Oak (STFAIRO)
Woolston (STWLSTN)
Bursledon (STBURSN)
Fawly (STFAWLY)
Hamble (STHAMBL)
Hythe (STHYTHE)
Moorhill (STMRHLL)
Chandlers Ford (STCFORD)
Leagrave (SMLEA)
Flitwick (SMFK)
Dunstable (SMDB)
Houghton Regis (SMHUR)
Braintree (EABNT)
STRATFORD (LNSTF)
WANSTEAD (LNWSD)
WOOLWICH (LSWOO)
EAST GRINSTEAD (NDEGR)
COPTHORNE (NDCOP)
SHIRLEY (STSHRLY)
ROWNHAMS (STRWNMS)
HAMPTON (STHMPTN)
BASSETT (STBSETT)
HORSHAM CARFAX (SDHRSHM)
SOUTHWATER (SDSTHWT)
AYLESBURY (SMAY)
PRINCES RISBOROUGH (SMPRB)
WENDOVER (SMWE)
GREENWICH (LSGRNW)
TOTTON (STTOTTN)
ROMSEY (STROMSY)

We have been notified of the below planned maintenance window affecting some O2 DSL connections:

Date - 10/05/2013

 Exchanges affected:

SMBF - BEDFORD
SMAP - AMPTHILL
SMKT - KEMPSTON
SMSA - SANDY
SMBB - BANBURY
LWRAD - RADLETT
LWGAR - GARSTON
SMAM - AMERSHAM
SMGM - GREAT MISSENDEN
SMBA - BRADWELL ABBEY
LWBUS - BUSHLEY HEATH
SMBK - BERKHAMSTED
THCW - CROWTHORNE
THY - YATELEY
THRG - READING CENTRAL
LNSTB - ST ALBANS
THC - CAMBERLEY
THWM - WOKINGHAM

We have had a few issues with RADIUS of late, and we have some changes in LNS code and RADIUS server code which should help to resolve these issues, and also resolve the cause of the last time we had an LNS crash.

We are planning to introduce the changes gradually during this week so that the impact of any problems will be reduced, and only effect some customers. We are not really expecting problems, just being cautious. Today we are testing changes on our test LNS which does have a handful of customers connected.

I do apologise in advance for any issues. Mostly RADIUS issues result in free (unmetered) usage, and in some cases extra PPP restarts.

In general we'll be making changes evening or early morning rather than during the day.

Thinks did not go quite as planned this evening when one of the test boxes upset RADIUS slightly and resulted in some PPP restarts. We think we have it sorted now so we can start to roll this out over the next few days.

We have been notified of the below planned maintenance window affecting some DSL connections, the exchanges affected: are:

MITCHAM
ORPINGTON
PURLEY

We have not done an LNS switch for some time, and it is usually a routine thing when we do s/w upgrades so not even posted on planned works. However, after the issues with a BT fibre yesterday resulted in some unexpected effects, we are planning some updates.

As some of you will know, the same effect, only lasting a few minutes, happened today as well. This was caused by a minor configuration change, and was unexpected.

It seems that we have found what triggers these problems. We need to investigate in more detail, and we will be doing tests on the test LNS. When we have a proper fix we will update the live LNSs. In the mean time we will avoid the config change that caused this.

However, right now, one of the LNSs is "stuck' in this broken state. It is only affecting some lines, and they have been moved to another LNS already. We will however be clearing the remaining lines (around 10% of customers) this evening. We can then restart the LNS in the morning and be back to normal.

The effect will be a PPP restart and should only be a few seconds downtime for those affected (but depends on your router).

It looks like we managed to rectify the problem without clearing lines off the LNS or restarting it. This provides more clues as to the cause. Thank you for your patience.

We are doing a few other upgrades before 6pm though, but they should not have any noticable impact.

BE lines on the MOORGATE exchange and currently down due to BT performing an upgrade on the exchange, the work is taking place between 11:00 and 17:00 however we expecty service will be restored before this time.

The work has been complete.

As part of O2's network upgrade to "Converged Core", we have been notified of a series of outages affecting the migration of their exchanges onto this new network. This is planned to take place over the next 12 months, and will involve every exchange being moved to new backhaul links.

We have been notified of a planned outage that will affect connections at the exchanges listed below. We anticipate that this will cause an outage of between 2 and 30 minutes and is expected to take place during the specified AM or PM slot:

19/04/2013
SSRED: Redcliff - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSWES: West - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSSTO: Stoke Bishop - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSSOU: South - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSBIS: Bishopsworth - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSWHI: Whitchurch - AM (11am - 6pm)

As part of O2's network upgrade to "Converged Core", we have been notified of a series of outages affecting the migration of their exchanges onto this new network. This is planned to take place over the next 12 months, and will involve every exchange being moved to new backhaul links.

We have been notified of a planned outage that will affect connections at the exchanges listed below. We anticipate that this will cause an outage of between 2 and 30 minutes and is expected to take place during the specified AM or PM slot:

18/04/2013
SSRAD: Radstock - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSTRO: Trowbridge - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSMEL: Melksham - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSKMD: Kingsmead - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSKWD: Kingswood - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSNOR: North - AM (11am - 6pm)
SSWOT: Westbury On Trym - AM (11am - 6pm)

As part of O2's network upgrade to "Converged Core", we have been notified of a series of outages affecting the migration of their exchanges onto this new network. This is planned to take place over the next 12 months, and will involve every exchange being moved to new backhaul links.

We have been notified of a planned outage that will affect connections at the exchanges listed below. We anticipate that this will cause an outage of between 2 and 30 minutes and is expected to take place during the specified AM or PM slot:

17/04/2013
SSAVO: Avonmouth - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSALM: Almondsbury - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSCSY: Chipping Sodbury - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSTHO: Thornbury - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSDOW: Downend - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSWIB: Winterbourne - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSFIS: Fishponds - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSEAS: Easton - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSEAV: Eastville - AM (9am - 2pm)
SSFLT: Filton - PM (9am - 2pm)
STSOTON: Southampton - PM (11am - 6pm)
SSHEN: Henbury - PM (11am - 6pm)
SSFRO: Frome - PM (11am - 6pm)
SSWAR: Warminister - PM (11am - 6pm)
SSMID: Midsomer Borton Rmcux - PM (11am - 6pm)

We have been notified of a planned outage that will affect connections at the exchanges listed below. We anticipate that this will cause an outage of between 2 and 30 minutes and is expected to take place during the specified AM or PM slot:

25/02/2013 STSHRLY: Shirley - AM (9am - 1pm) STRWNMS: Rownhams - AM (9am - 1pm) STTOTTN: Totton - AM (9am - 1pm) STROMSY: Romsey - AM (9am - 1pm) STBSETT: Bassett - AM (9am - 1pm) STFAWLY: Fawley - AM (9am - 1pm) STBURSN: Bursledon - AM (9am - 1pm) STHMPTN: Hampton - PM (11am - 5pm) STHYTHE: Hythe - PM (11am - 5pm)

26/02/2013 STMRHLL: Moorhill - AM (9am - 1pm) STCFORD: Chandlers Ford - AM (9am - 1pm) STLOCKH: Locks Heath - AM (9am - 1pm) STLYMTN: Lymington - AM (9am - 1pm) SMLEA: Leagrave - AM (9am - 1pm) SMFK: Flitwick - AM (9am - 1pm) STSOTON: Southampton - AM/PM (9am - 5pm)

27/02/2013 SMAY: Aylesbury - AM (9am - 1pm) SMBT: Milton Keynes - AM (9am - 1pm) SMDB: Dunstable - AM (9am - 1pm) SMSA: Sandy - AM (9am - 1pm) SMKT: Kempston - AM (9am - 1pm) SMLBD: Leighton Buzzard - PM (11am - 5pm) SMBF: Bedford - PM (11am - 5pm)

28/02/2013 SMBB: Banbury - AM (9am - 1pm) SMBY: Brackley - AM (9am - 1pm) SMBU: Buckingham - AM (9am - 1pm) SMBA: Bradwell Abbey - AM (9am - 1pm) SMAP: Ampthill - PM (11am - 5pm) SMNP: Newport Pagnell - PM (11am - 5pm) SMSSF: Stony Stratford - PM (11am - 5pm) SMSU: Shenley Church End - PM (11am - 5pm) SMWV: Wolverton - PM (11am - 5pm)

01/03/2013 LWBUS: Bushey Heath - AM (9am - 1pm) LWWAT: Watford - AM (9am - 1pm) LNBGN: Bowmansgreen - AM (9am - 1pm) SMCSH: Chesham - AM (9am - 1pm) SMAM: Amersham - AM (9am - 1pm) SMLH: Letchworth - AM (9am - 1pm) SMHI: Hitchin - AM (9am - 1pm) SMHUR: Houghton Regis - AM (9am - 1pm) LNSTB: St Albans - AM/PM (9am - 5pm) LWRAD: Radlett - PM (11am - 5pm) SMLT: Luton - PM (11am - 5pm)

We have received this from our suppliers regarding how the 'wholesale' arm of O2/Be is affected:

Telefonica have today announced the sale of the O2 Home Broadband and BE customer bases to Sky.

http://news.o2.co.uk/?press-release=sky-to-acquire-telefonica-uks-broadband-and-fixed-line-telephony-business

We would like to confirm that only the O2 Home Broadband and BE Consumer customers have been sold to Sky.

O2 Wholesale is being retained by Telefonica and will maintain its access to the network. We have been given clarification on the following from O2 Wholesale:

    The deal is subject to regulatory approval

    Sky will be taking over ownership and day to day operation of the LLU network

    Sky will integrate the current ISAMs into their network

    O2 Wholesale will become a customer of SKY with a wholesale agreement in place so that they can continue to provide wholesale services to partners as normal

That being said, we've asked for a more detailed clarification on the matter. 

No more news regarding this, however it is to be considered business as usual regarding Be Wholesale lines.

We'll update this as and when we get updates, but from our point of view the service is unchanged.

The 'per IP stats' usages pages are not working very well at the moment. Some customers are not seeing any usage, and some are seeing very little usage, and others are seeing correct amounts of usage!

This is being looked in to.

This does not affect the 'Line' usage or any billing based usage records. 

We are sorry for how long this has been ongoing.
We are still trying to resolve the issue, however it is taking a lot longer than we expected.

We do not currently have an ETA however we will update this status once we have further news.

The Home::1 tariff originally had a complicated set of caveats for leaving the service within one year (paying for router, min term of 12 months on FTTC, and cease charges if ceasing).

We have decided to change this to a simple 6 month min term with no catches. This is a slight gamble for us, but we think it helps a lot to make this a simple tariff.

Obviously those customers that have signed up before this change can choose to stick to the previous arrangement instead if they want to leave.

We have tweaked the new Home::1 tariff, making the entry level 50GB, and the two higher usage levels 150GB and 250GB, with all the same pricing.

See my blog for me details on the logic of making this change.

We have applied this to existing customers for this month's usage quota.

See the following page for the press release:
http://aa.net.uk/news-2012-home1.html

(New customers can order via a simple 1 page form.)

http://www.aa.net.uk/news-2012-christmas.html

We are pleased to confirm that customers on our standard units based tariffs will again benefit from a Christmas special rate between Christmas and New Year.

The three normal working days between Christmas and New Year will be a Christmas special rate which consumes no units regardless of the amount of usage. That is 27th Dec, 28th Dec, and 31st Dec. The 29th Dec and 30th Dec being normal Weekend rates. The 25th Dec, 26th Dec, 1st Jan, and (for lines in Scotland) 2nd Jan, are the new Holiday rate (same usage levels as weekends).

Customers on our new Home::1 tariff (which we expect to have launched by then) have usage allowances that can be used any time of day and day of the year, so there is no special rate for Christmas. However, we will be adding an extra 3GB to your December monthly quota on Christmas morning.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all at A&A

We're please to say the trials are going well. We expect to formally "launch" the new tariff next week at least for existing customers. I'd like to thank those that have come forward for the trail. This has ben most helpful in testing the systems, and I am rather reassured that many people are actually keen to pay a few more pounds a month for the reassurance and simplicity of the new tariff. This bodes well for it being commercially viable.

Anyone else wishing to move to the new tariff, retrospectively applied for November, is welcome to ask me on irc (RevK) and I can sort the switch over.

We'll post more details next week, and how new customers can order as soon as we have the ordering system in place.

We have decided to extend the new Home::1 tariff to 20CN lines as well.

Let us know if you are interested in the trial.

http://aa.net.uk/broadband-home1.html

We are planning a new tariff for home users, called Home::1, and we hope to launch this new tariff by Christmas.

Details are on http://aa.net.uk/broadband-home1.html

The details are not quite finalised yet. We are however interested in a small number of customers that would like to change to the new tariff. We'd switch you to this retropectively for November, which helps us test the change over to start of new month, and the billing, and (if anyone is close to their quota) the top-up system.

Contact the trials team on the email address on that web page if interested.

We are happy to announced BT have finally lifted the remaining MBORC areas.

BT have announced that the following areas are under MBORC (Matters beyond our reasonable control): 

Northumberland
Wearside
Durham & Tees Valley
York
Bradford & the Dales
Leeds & West Yorkshire
South Yorkshire and Chesterfield
North Lincoln
Cumbria
North Manchester
South Manchester
Merseyside
Lancashire
Derby & Nottingham
Leicester
Birmingham & Black Country
Mid Wales & Shrewsbury
North Wales
Stoke & Chester
NE Scotland
Central Scotland
SE Scotland
Aylesbury
Northampton
Southampton

The impact this will have is that any jobs that involve a BT engineer are likely to take longer to progress, eg: Installs / SFIs.

We will update once BT give us more news as to when this is likely to be lifted. 

As per: http://aa.net.uk/news-2012-09-bh.html

We are pleased to announce that from today all bank holidays and public holidays will be treated in the same way as evenings and weekends for all of our broadband line customers. This means that the usage rate on these days will be metered at 50GB per unit.

We are proud to be an ISP that listens to our customers, and that makes changes in line with their suggestions if it is possible for us to do so. In this case, taking into account the 154 votes from our ideas site, and also feedback we received from customers after the Royal Wedding and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, we have made this change today.

Looking forward, although there are no huge national events in the near future, we hope customers will find it useful for watching streamed television or movies on demand, or doing those data-heavy operating system updates, on their days off.

Notes

This will only apply to broadband line usage, not VoIP, or L2TP, or mobile or anything else. Public and bank holidays are different in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so we use the line postcode to work out which applies. The first example will be 30th Nov for St Andrew's day relating only to Scottish lines.

This evening iOS6 is launched. Previous experience suggests this will be a big spike in demand that will be more than the Olympics or the World Cup.

It is quite likely to cause some links to hit limits. We have systems designed to manage this sensibly, giving priority to small packets such as VoIP and DNS if any links are full.

Seems also an OS X 10.8.2 update as well, double whammy

So far, links are coping...

OS X upgrade is 365MB

WARNING! if you value usable maps, don't upgrade to iOS6. See http://revk.www.me.uk/2012/09/ios6-maps-are-crap.html

Now we are starting to see some high usage...

Looks mostly affecting 21CN at present.

From around 20:00 to 23:00 there was some congestion on 21CN lines due to the iOS and OSX upogrades last night.

As of 14:40 today RIPE NCC have confirmed :-

"On Friday, 14 September 2012, the RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, distributed the last blocks of IPv4 address space from the available pool."

Obviously, having provided IPv6 for over 10 years, AAISP have been ready for this news. Whilst we have plans for conservation of remaining IPv4 addresses, we do plan to continue providing at least a static IPv4 external address to all new customers for some years to come, avoiding any 'Carrier Grade NAT' being needed within our network. New customers already receive an IPv6 assignment and pre-configured IPv6 router as standard.

The technicalities of the current IPv4 managent: We are reviewing all IPv4 usage and recovering any that can be reduced or reclaimed (customer and internal usage). We are advising customers of IPv6 usage where not currently deployed and where this could return some IPv4 space. The on-line ordering does not offer IPv4 blocks, but they can still be requested if needed.

Just to keep you updated - following a fibre failure on Monday, BT thought they had fixed it Monday night, but it was down an hour later. They thought the fixed it yesterday, but our monitoring shows the fibre is still not right and we await an update.

In the mean time traffic is using the remaining 3 LNSs as expected.

BT think it is fixed - we are monitoring for 24 hours before putting traffic on it.

Looks like Bt finally fixed this last night, and we are monitoring it

Well, that sporting event is over, for now. And there was indeed some extra traffic because of it. However, I am pleased to report that we managed quite well.

The only daytime blip we had was 15:30 to 16:00 on 1st August. We had several periods during the day where we did just hit limits, but only just, and no rate limiting kicking in. This has affected our "errored seconds" stats. For 21CN the last 14 days shows as 95.5% with 20CN staying at 100.0% - this is based on seconds during which even a single packet was dropped. Levels are back to normal now and so these, and the 24 hour stats, will come back up to our target of 100.0%.

Overall this means we coped with the traffic well, and without slowdowns (apart from around half an hour on the 1st). The backhaul links seemed mostly OK, on BT, though some congestion was apparent on some of the BE lines.

I'd like to thank the staff for their hard work over the whole period - you deserve a gold medal.

Apparently there is something of a local sporting event starting end of this week...

We do have a capacity increase happening this week. There is no easy way for us to tell if it will be enough for usage demands. If it seems that usage is excessive then we will order more. We do have the ability to add some additional capacity if needed at no notice, and more at 5 days notice, so we'll see how it goes.

Our main customer facing DNS resolvers are now validating DNSSEC records. 

For more information see the original planned work post: http://status.aa.net.uk/1570

We have had a few reports of some invoices being emailed twice. Please do not panic, it is the same invoice, just emailed twice. You can tell from the invoice number.

We also have a number of invoices that did not get emailed until this afternoon.

Basicallt, it looks like the job to send emailed invoices did not quite behave correctly for some reason. I don't think it is leap second related

As some customers may have noticed, the extra bank holiday at the start of June caused some sifferences to the normal Direct Debit payments. Basically, customers who are normally billed on the 1st but have picked Direct Debit collection on the 9th of the month were not charged for their 1st June invoice on the 9th of June as you might have expected.

The reason for this is that the billing system tries to ensure that you always have the agreed 5 working days notice for an invoice, and that was simply not possible for an invoice on the 1st and Direct Debit on the 9th June, because of the extra bank holiday for the Queen's Jubilee.

The result was that invoices on the 1st June had extended credit terms with payment collect on 9th July rather than 9th June. The invoice you were sent did state the extended credit terms, and the Direct Debit notices sent are all correct. Your invoice is not paid late because of this, it is extra credit we are giving you. You will get a further Direct Debit notice for your July 1st invoice to be collected on 9th July.

This only affects some customers with specific billing cycle and direct debit date selection. As per consumer credit rules I can confirm this was 0.0% APR interest for the extra month's credit.

Whilst an extra bank holiday like this is rare, it is possible for an Easter to cause the same problem in teh future, so we have made some changes. Customers asking to have Direct Debit collections on a specific date, such as the 9th, will now find that it can be collected up to 3 working days after the date agreed. This is consistent with Direct Debit rules which allow 3 working days after the notified collection date. We will normally aim to collect on the agreed date or the next working day as now, but invoices due very close to the collection date could have the collection delayed like this to allow for the agreed 5 working days notice.

I appreciate this is give some customers an extra month's interest free credit on their bill, which is a tad unfair to other customers. and that even those that have benefitted from this may find the payment collections confusion. Hopefully this will not happen in the future.

Everything through BT blipped at 3am - lines came back, most within a minute or two. Some got "stuck" on BT's default accept for 10 minutes, some a few times. We suspect some BT planned works, but we are checking in to this.

BT will be carrying out work on our core link to them to increase resilience. There will be two short outages lasting about 5 minutes each.

Planned start: 20/06/2012 01:30
Planned finish: 20/06/2012 06:00

(This is similar to the work being carried out on the 19th, but this work is at a different physical location.)

We've been asked a few times today if BE lines with us are affected by the recent network blocks that have been put in place on BE Retail ADSL line, just to confirm that we are not affected by this.

BT will be carrying out work on our core link to them to increase resilience. There will be two short outages lasting about 5 minutes each.

Planned start: 19/06/2012 02:00
Planned finish: 19/06/2012 06:00

For some reason people always pop up and ask this every bank / public holiday, and even more so this week.

As per our web site, the daytime usage rate is:-

Daytime
9am-6pm Mon-Fri

That is what it says. It really is crystal clear. From this you can work out of *Monday* and *Tuesday* between 9am and 6pm this week are normal daytime usage.

I can see that maybe there is some confusion because we usually announce that Christmas week is a special rate. Even so, this week is not Christmas either. I am not sure how we can make it clearer, to be honest. Suggestions welcome.

I do apologise for this post being a tad condescending. There are, of course, many things where public holidays are a special rate, and many where they are not. I think we do make it clear.

Whilst we don't really have to give reasons for why we do things this way, it is just the way we have chosen to do the pricing, there are, of course, some purely practical reasons - such as the fact that public holidays are regional, and vary over England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, all of which have our services.

There is no intention to be difficult, or cryptic in the terms and pricing - they really are meant to be clear. One of our aims as a company is to be open an honest. It is just a tad frustrating when, having made it clear, people continue to make assumptions and then get annoyed that they were wrong.

We have decided to give the staff today (Tuesday) off as well. There is, as usual, some level of support on irc where staff are putting in some of their own time. There is, as usualy, support for major outages. Sereval of us are working this weekend, including various router upgrades and software development.

I hope everyone has a good weekend.

There are a number of customers with open DNS relays on their networks. Some of these appear to be being exploited as part of a DDOS with, we think, spoofed source DNS lookups.

As this is undoubtedly causing problems for whoever is being attacked, as well as causing excessive broadband usage for affected customers, we are going to attempt to make a list of these relays so that the affected customers can be identified.

You may see DNS lookup attempts from one of our IPs in your firewall logs.

We have made changes to the domain control pages today.

1. The name servers are now shown as NS records in the zone rather than as a list at the top of the page. You can edit these at the top level even if we are not serving your zone as these are used to record the delegation details from the registry.

2. You can now add DS records to the zone. You can edit these at the top level even if we are not serving your zone as these are used to record the delegation details from the registry.

3. If the domain is a UK domain managed by nominet then you have new buttons. The "refresh" button will get the current contact details, NS, and DS records from the registry and update the domain details. The "send" button will send the details to the registry with immediate effect. This means customers can now change delegation NS and DS records as well as contact details on UK domains managed by nominet from the control pages.

Please ensure that your contact details are valid. As an individual you have the option to select "withheld" to not show these in the normal whois records, but you must have correct contact details otherwise you could lose your domain.

Any problems, please contact support for help.

We now have per-IP usage stats available for broadband customers. You can view usage based on your IPv6 and legacy IPv4 addresses. The data is broken down in to daily and hourly totals for upload and download.

The usages is based on 'sampled' data, so will not be 100% accurate, but should give a good idea as to how your usage is spread across your machines.

The data is updated every minute or so.

You can find this from the Usage page on the Control Pages. We welcome feedback.

(Per-IP usage is not being collected for customers using L2TP, SIMs, Ethernet or the 'test LNS'.)

You can do reverse DNS lookups on the per IP stats now.

The FTTC 80M/20M trial ends on the 10th April and official launch is the 11th April.

Any customers who wish to downgrade back to their original FTTC service can do so without being tied into a new 12 month contract, also customers who wish to continue with the 80M service can do so without being tied to a new 12 Month contract.

Please email trials@aa.net.uk if you wish to move your line back to it's original state by the 6th April so that they can be moved back by the 10th.

We have pretty much decided the plan for FTTC lines moving forwards.

Basically, FTTC comes in many flavours in terms of what we can get out of BT. We are going to sell in exactly two flavours for customers as follows:-

1. Basic, which is the "not more than" 40Mbs down and the "not more than" 10Mb/s up sync speed.

2. Premium, for £10+VAT (£12) more a month which includes the "not more than" 80Mb/s down "not more than" 20Mb/s up speed and also elevated weighting within BT and priority in our network in congestion.

Note that the premium is not guaranteeing to be faster than the basic if you have a line that will not do more than 40/10 but will still cost more for the "elevated weighting" within BT and priority in our network.

The only issue here is that some people do not fit this. e.g. People on 40/2, or on 40/10 with elevated weighting. These people will pay for basic or premium based on the elevated weighting and have the option to upgrade the sync speed for £10+VAT and restarting the 12 month minimum term. Even so, upgrading to 80/20 will not always work in that a long line may not manage those speeds - in such cases the "premium" option is still provided by elevated weighting in BT and priority in our network for the extra £10+VAT per month charge.

People wanting to drop "premium", especially if they cannot get 80/20, can do so on our normal terms (charge for dropping premium)

The plan is for this all to start 1st April.

We had a blip today, and one over the weekend where some lines went off line and some were severely limited in throughput for a minute or two. It did not affect all customers.

We have identified the cause and we are moving to later code on the LNSs. The last one will be upgraded tonight.

I do apologise for not posting earlier on this - a snag with the status page system.

A recent change to make routing more tightly timed with the PPP link on our broadband lines means any customers that are not negotiating IPV6CP are not getting IPv6 routing at all.

Previously we were being technically incorrect routing traffic without IPV6CP negotiation completing.

Examples are customers using pppd on linux based equipment.

The solution is to add +ipv6 to the config for the peer.

Please ask for more advice on irc if you have any issues.

We have had a couple of customers on the FTTC 80Mb/s -20Mb/s 'technical trial' for some time and we're now able to accept customers on to the national 80/20FTTC trial.

This is open to all FTTC customers, as well as people wanting to upgrade or migrate to us. There is no cost for existing FTTC customers to migrate to 80/20, and the migration should happen overnight.

At the moment there are a few 'unknowns' - such as what the cost difference will be and how long the trial will last.

For more information please email trials@aa.net.uk

There is no additional costs for the trial and we will inform customers of launch pricing before the trial end to give you the opportunity to downgrade your line so as not to incur the extra charges of the 80/20M service

Speedtest result from some of the trialists:

160M from the cab:

Line with 79.7M line rate:

Line with 79.7M line rate:

Line with 76M line rate:

Line with 79.7M line rate, 200m from cab (via Remote desktop!)

Line with 71.9M line rate, 250m from cab:

Line with 79.7M line rate, about 500m from the cab:

Line with 79.7M line rate:/p>

Line with 38M line rate, 700m from the cab:

Over the last few weeks we have seen a number of cases where RADIUS accounting is not working correctly. This is usually when we do an LNS switch or BT have a blip or some other case where there is a lot of traffic for connecting and disconnecting circuits.

We are going to be working on this to make the accounting much more robust, but it will take some time to track down the exact cause and may mean some changes on the LNSs (which originate the RADIUS accounting) as well.

The impact is that it can mean a line appears to be off line on the control pages when it is not, or shows the line status in an odd colour. In most cases it has the side affect of not metering usage and so giving customers free bandwidth.

We'll post more details when we have them.

We have made some changes today and they seem promising. It looks like we have managed to ensure RADIUS accounting is must more reliable. We'll be monitoring during the day.

See my blog...

http://revk.www.me.uk/2012/02/silly-set-backs-today.html

As part of our major upgrade work, customers may find they are on any of the four LNSs currently in use, A/B (in the old rack) and C/D (in the new rack). If you find you have bonded lines with some one A/B and some on C/D then you can ppp kill the A/B lines to catch up. We are working on tools to monitor split bonded lines anyway though this should not normally happen.

We will probably zap all lines still on A/B tomorrow morning so that we are fully operating on the new host links in to BT.

Wholesale customers will not be affected.

P.S. Seeing as I am up anyway (grrrr) I am running through all non wholesale lines that have said a pre 2am is preferred and moving over to new LNSs now.

Well, we have managed to integrate the new rack in to the network now, without any nasty blips. Things are looking good.

We even have one of the staff FTTC lines on the new BT host link working. A whole gigabit host link and 10 FB6000 series gigabit routers being being used by just one line - nice one Paul!

This means we are ready to move some of our interconnect links over, like LINX and LONAP.

At the weekend we plan to switch all customer traffic to the new host link - as a normal LNS switch, over night.

Thank you all for your patience and understanding during this major upgrade.

More on my blog http://revk.www.me.uk/2012/02/well-someone-has-to-test-it.html