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 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.

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.

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

OK, the mad scientist style cackling is probably not appropriate, but yes - the new BT host links are up and working. This is one of the key steps in the upgrade plans.

Over the afternoon we are stitiching the network together one step at a time and testing carefully at each step. We may leave the final linking in of the existing rack until after 5pm. More to follow.

We expect to do an LNS switch to the new LNSs on the new host links later in the week.

From next month (Feb 2012) there are a few minor changes to prices.

FTTC and FTTP monthly prices are slightly reduced so that the VAT inclusive monthly price with two units is now £30

BE monthly prices are slightly reduced so that the VAT inclusive monthly price with two units is now £40

Premium and enhanced care options are increased to £10+VAT (£12).

Due to the increase in prices on premium and enhanced care, any customers wishing to cease these services next month will not be charged the usual £10 for stopping these services in an active line. Please email sales to have your invoice adjusted.

We currently operate two LNSs (the boxes that handle all of our broadband traffic). We have one live system and one as a hot standby backup. They are designe to handle a gigabit of internet traffic to customers, and as we saw when IOS5 was released they can even exceed that a little.

When we want to upgrade software, after testing on our test LNSs we load the new code in to the backup LNS. We then do an LNS switch - causing all lines to drop, one at a time, and reconnect a few seconds later to the new LNS.

During this month we are upgrading our core network and we now have four LNSs. The new ones are being tested now and once they are fully deployed we will operate with three live LNSs. These will share the load, but we are taking care to ensure a customer with line bonding is connected to just one LNS so that the bonding stays working. The 4th LNS is for upgrades.

What this means is that when we want to upgrade, we will upgrade the 4th LNS, and re-designate one of the other three as the new spare LNS. We will clear sessions from that LNS which will reconnect to the new LNS. This means an LNS switch will only affect a third of the customers. However, to upgrade the live LNSs to new code we have to do all three. It means an LNS switch will be in three distinct stages and may not even be done on the same day if this is just a routine upgrade.

However, during January (and possibly in to Februrary if BT drag their heels) we will need to do the existing LNS switches to move traffic to the right boxes while we actually deploy the new equipment and move BT links. This should be no more disruptive than a normal LNS switch, and we will try and schedule these for Saturday nights as usual.

Thank you all for your patience during this essential upgrade work.

The Constant Quality Monitoring (CQM) graphs for our broadband service includes a "speed line" which shows the line speed. This was set based on the BT BRAS rate which changed relatively infrequently. The speed line only shows the last 2 changes in speed.

The speed line is a useful reference, especially on the historical graph data.

We are now setting speeds based on the sync rate at connection where possible (21CN lines and BE lines). This can be several changes in speed on one graph losing the oldest speeds and causing confusion on the historical graphs.

We are making a change over the next few days which will make the speed line show on a per hour basis - showing the highest line in that hour. This will avoid losing historical data if there are many rate changes.

For most customers this will have no impact as the speed of your line will remain stable for a long period.

We have been advised by BT that they are wanting to replace the FTTC modem that has been provided as part of your FTTC internet connection.

Our FTTC customers will be emailed this information, and will be contacted by 'Kelly Communications' in the new year.

Details follow:

To make sure you always get the best possible broadband service, we’re going to swap your current broadband modem (the white box with the Openreach logo on the front) for a better one. 

Why are we (BT) doing this?

We have recently found a problem with a handful of modems that could cause connection problems with broadband in the future. Although you might not have noticed anything wrong, we don’t believe in taking chances.  So we are working to replace the current modem with a new one to make sure your service keeps running smoothly now and long into the future.

What do you need to do?

Just let one of our supplier’s engineers (Kelly Communications) come round and install your new modem. We’ll do the work whenever it suits you – daytime, evening or weekend.  And you won’t have to pay for anything.

How long will it take?

Our engineer will only take around 30 minutes to swap your existing BT Openreach modem for the new version. And they will make sure everything’s running perfectly before they leave.

What happens next?

You’ll get a call from a company called Kelly Communications, who are working on behalf of BT Openreach, to set up the appointments.

Once you’ve agreed a time, all you have to do is be there to let in our engineer and, for your peace of mind, we have asked all our Engineers to introduce themselves and show their ID before carrying out the required work.

Any questions?

If you have any questions, please call Kelly Communications on 01384 418023 or via email appt.enquiries@kelly.co.uk.

Alternatively, if you have any concerns or queries, please contact AAISP on 03333 400999 or support@aa.net.uk.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Customers have not yet been contacted by 'Kelly Communications' so please don't worry that you've not been contacted! We'll post again when customers have started to be contacted, and we'll post with anohter update in a couple of weeks time.

BT have advised us that they have not yet passed on our customer information to Kelly Communications - it will be a couple of weeks (at least) before they start contacting customers.

Kelly Ltd. have started to send out letters to customers regarding changing the modem.

BT have been in touch and are saying:

Kelly are still working through the lists and hope to complete at the end of April.

Anyone who has not received a letter does not need a new modem, the ones with a higher potential for failure are a specific time bound batch.

We have seen a couple of incidents with the Kelly online booking tool, and there were resolved by telephoning the contact number on the letter.

Do get in touch with us if you have problems or questions though.

From what we can tell there are changes planned by BT that should increase FTTC line speeds even further in the new year - I'll post more when we have details.

Some more tweaks on line speeds today, affecting 20CN, and some recent tweaks affecting FTTC. This is a bit guesswork and a bit research, but ultimately you have control as you can adjust what we are setting.

We want our shapers set the same as the actual line rate. The idea is that we are not the bottleneck, but by having accurate speed settings we manage multi-line bonding and VoIP much better. So what we are trying to do is get the rate as accurate as possible.

Changes within BT's network mean we can do higher rate now, but it also means we are havin to work out the exact rules - not just how sync speed maps to throughput but how the rate we get from BT matches. That seems to be almost the same as the sync speed but not quite. Then the overheads depend if normal DSL or FTTC or FTTP as well. So it is tricky to get exactly right.

The latest changes mean we are allowing only a tiny margin for FTTC as (apparently) the sync speed is close to ethernet throughput rates (just the way it is reported). We are also trying to set accurate rates on 20CN though it is not yet clear if this works (i.e. 20CN may still have the chunky BRAS rates applied). More testing with customers should help us confirm this.

The end result is faster lines for everyone, even if only a few percent. But remember, this is just the starting point - you can use the control pages to then adjust that from 90% to 110%. You may way 95% to maximise the VoIP handling by ensuring we are the bottle by a few percent. The 110% is useful if you think we have our logic wrong (and if tests show this, please do email us). Either way, you have control.

Having changed our systems to pick up the rate we are advised on the connection and not the fixed "BRAS" rate that used to apply - we are seeing significant improvements. Apart from lines gaining up to 1M because of the BRAS steps, we also see lines where the BRAS was clearly stuck much lower than it should have been.

However, testing over the last few days has resulted in a slight snag - the speed we are getting is (as we suspected) the sync rate. This means, like the BE lines we have, this rate is higher than the IP throughput. In fact, on BE lines we set the rate at 13% less than the sync rate to allow for ATM overheads.

We have no problem with tracking lines at the sync rate - means we are definitely not the bottleneck on the line - however it means that the system to prioritice VoIP is not working any more on such lines as BT control the flow at the DSLAM now.

Some tests suggest the 13% is about right, and in fact people may want slightly lower if using VoIP.

As a result we have made the system automatically apply a ratio for the line time, so 87% of sync for BE and BT 21CN lines. We'll adjust this globally if needed in future. 20CN lines use the BRAS rate and so use that 100%.

Customers can then control a furthe adjustment to this allowing 95% for VoIP usage for example, and allowing more than 100% so that the DSLAM is the rate limiter (not ideal for VoIP).

December 2011 It seems there are a couple of things happening that mean almost all of our 21CN customers will get slightly more speed!

We don't have any briefings from BT on this yet, but various investigations have suggested some things are changing now.

If we get more concrete information from BT on this, I'll update this news page.

FTTC frequency plan changes

It seems there has been a frequency plan change involving the VDSL links used for FTTC. This seems to be a prelude to trials of 80M FTTC services soon. We don't have any more details to publish on the 80M trials, but like some other ISPs we are on the trial. What is interesting is the frequency plan changes that are happening or have happened appear to be improving the sync speed of normal FTTC customers on the normal 40M services. The result is many more are now able to get the full 40M or at least a few meg more than before.

21CN BRAS steps

It seems BT are not longer running the BRAS rate limiters for 21CN lines (ADSL and FTTC) in the distinct 1M steps as before. It appears that the rate limiting is the line rate now.

Again, without a clear briefing, we cannot be sure this is all 21CN lines yet, but it seems to be the case on the ones we have checked.

The main impacts of this are (a) you do not lose up to a megabit because of the BRAS rate being in distinct steps, and (b) you do not have to have to wait after a sync speed change for BT to apply a new BRAS rate (can take hours). Also, of course, all of the possible error cases where the BRAS rate does not match no longer apply.

What we have changed

The main change we have made today (13th Dec) is that for 21CN lines we are no longer applying the BRAS rate update messages we get from BT but instead we are now using the rate we get when you connect. This will take effect next time you connect and show the rate on your control pages as the BRAS rate. Some BT tests still report the old BRAS rate system in the logs though. We will probably do an LNS upgrade at the weekend meaning all 21CN lines will update, but if you want this sooner you just need a PPP kill on your line to pick up the new speed.

These changes are particularly useful when they apply together as we have seen FTTC lines gain significant speed (e.g. 30M to 39M) and not update BRAS rates.

We should be able to order services on a new rural broadband platform in Little London and Smannell now. Contact sales if you are interested.

More on http://aa.net.uk/broadband-RB.html

http://maps.google.com/maps?t=m&q=51.246724,-1.456587&ie=UTF8&vpsrc=0&layer=c&cbll=51.238754,-1.456567&panoid=51zrR1mZmxzX47tQD2s9Mg&cbp=12,38.54,,0,9.62&ll=51.238666,-1.456461&spn=0.017787,0.030921&z=16

We do now have the IPv6 firmware shipping as standard on the Technicolor routers.

We are obviously keen on any feedback on them as the manufacturers are still taking on any issues we find before making this a general release.

In January we'll be starting a 80M down, 20M up FTTC trial. If you are in an area that can get FTTC or currently have FTTC and want to be part of the trial, please email trial@aa.net.uk for further information.

Numbers will be limited.

NOTE: Just to clarify trial open to existing FTTC customers only and not new installs (sorry)

NOTE: We now have enough customers for the trial so please no more requests

As of today (11/11/11) we are changing the routers we offer slightly.

• The Billion 7800N is no longer free for new installs, but still available at normal retail price.
• The Technocolor TG582n (IPv4 only) is available from today and is offered as our free with broadband router.
• We are starting field trials of a new IPv6 router

More details: http://aa.net.uk/news-2011-11-routers.html

http://aa.net.uk/news-2011-10.html

Summary:-

• Increased daytime usage allowance on Be and 21CN
• Changing evening/weekend allowance to the same as 20CN
• Slight increase in usage costs making entry level 2 unit broadband £20/month.

By the way we have increased capacity to BT during the day today as well - after high usage yesterday (which seems more generally high internet than usual even).

The day time usage increases have now been added to the system so they will apply for October. The evening/weekend decreases will not be until November.

The usage page for broadband lines now has an uptime column showing a percentage. This is really only any use if you have your router(s) permantely on-line.

This shows the uptime for each day and for the last couple of months. The daily stats are per line. The monthly stats are per login. Stats started around 8th August and so will show around 77% at the end of August for the month. These stats will start to become useful at the end of September.

They are primarily for your information and amusement and we may publish some aggregate stats in the future so people have a more realistic idea of broaband availablity, though some people do actually turn off their router over night which makes it more difficult, but it should be interesting.

And yes, the current day and current month can show over 100% as the stats can be up to an hour out either way due to the way the accounting is reported. Stats for previous days and months will be complete. Stats for a login are based on time when any line on the login is up (including 3G or L2TP backup).