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Here are our opening times over the Christmas and new year holidays:

When we're open, our staff will be available in all the usual ways (Telephone, email, SMS, IRC etc).

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We are currently trialling a new invoice format for print and PDF invoices. We hope to have some customers seeing the new format from next month and ideally have everyone on it by the end of the year.

For most people the layout is very much the same. If your invoice fits on one page, it will still do so. There are some very minor changes to letterhead and layout, and some information is bigger and clearer than before.

Anyone that gets a multi-page invoice will immediately notice we are now putting a summary and invoice totals on page 1, making it easier to find what you actually owe. We hope you find this useful, and overall it means long invoices will be quite a lot shorter than before.

The other change is much better support for unicode, including Polish characters (for example), and Chinese, and so on. We hope to eventually be able to cope with people's names from around the world with ease in all of our systems.

As always the formal invoice remains the PGP signed plain text as emailed, these changes only impact the PDF and print versions. We are considering improvements to the plain text invoicing in the future.

Invoices are still available via XML, and you may see some additional objects and attributes have been added in some places, as our new invoice formatting system uses the XML as its source!

Any comments or questions, please do let us know.

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Today we have re-launched our Office::1 package!

The Office::1 package is designed to be a complete Internet solution for a small/medium sized business. The package includes installation of three new lines, two for VDSL and one for ADSL, a configured and managed FireBrick FB2900 router, blocks of static IPv6 and IPv4 addresses as required and optional 3G/4G fail over.

The connectivity comprising of bonded VDSL circuits (usually via different back-haul carriers), fail-over to ADSL and 3G/4G are designed to keep the internet working in the event of faults occurring.

The FireBrick FB2900 routers will take care of the bonding and fail over and also has other functions that customers may find useful such as its VoIP PAPX and IPsec features.

More information here: https://aa.net.uk/broadband-office1.html

(Existing customers can move to the new package if/when their initial 12 month term has completed)

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In similar fashion to our Home::1 2TB tariff increase, we're happy to announce that from August 1st the existing 2TB SoHo::1 tariff will become 5TB/month. No change in cost, this applies to existing and new customers. The 'quota bonus' will still be applied.

Our order pages and web pages will be updated w/b 30th July. Customers ordering the SoHo::1 2TB tariff during July will be changed to 5TB on August 1st.

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When we first launched our 1TB tariff, the idea was that it was meant to be 'pretty much unlimited for most people'. Most of our customers don't go over 1TB (1 terabyte) and the quota isn't something they worry about.

However, usage patterns change, people watch more streaming video and download more. In an effort to keep to the original goal of the 1TB tariff, we're happy to announce that from August 1st the 1TB Home::1 tariff will become 2TB/month. No change in cost, and the 'quota bonus' will still be applied.

Our order pages and web pages will be updated w/b 30th July. Customers ordering the 1TB tariff during July will be changed to 2TB on August 1st.

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We are pleased to announce that 160M FTTP services are now available to existing and new customers.

Customers with an existing 80M FTTP service can email in to our sales team to request an upgrade. The 160M option costs an extra £10/month. New customers can order via our order/quote form: https://order.aa.net.uk/chaos2broadband.html

A couple of important notes...

1. If you use the availability checker, either use a phone number of a line at the address, or use a postcode and follow the link to do a full address check. Just checking on postcode is not good enough.

2. We are not doing FTTP-on-demand. All the quotes we have done have been crazy (more than a normal fibre Ethernet install in some cases) and as we understand it from other ISPs the lead times and hassle are still untenable.

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Andrews & Arnold Ltd (A&A) announce first customer trial of G.Fast; the new broadband technology from Openreach, initially enabling speeds of up to 160 Mbit/sec down and 50 Mbits/sec up.

The underlying technology, a variation on existing DSL, uses several techniques to allow for theoretical bandwidths of up to 1Gbit/sec on very very short phone lines, but at present, Openreach is launching with 160 and 330Mbit options. A&A intends to offer 330Mbit services in due course, but is launching 160Mbit services on a trial basis initially.

A&A predict that the major use-case for this new broadband option will be customers who wish to achieve higher uplink speeds.

Alex Bloor, General Manager of A&A said,
"We have reached a point where, practically speaking, many users will not notice the difference between an 80Mbit service and a 160Mbit service most of the time. Even a 4K video stream, for example from Netflix, will only use a fraction of the available capacity on an 80Meg link. But what many of our customers really will benefit from is the higher uplink speed. As services like Dropbox are still gaining popularity, so the customer wish to synchronise seamlessly into the cloud becomes more and more common. And theoretical 50Mbit/sec upload should help greatly with this. Of course, the higher downstream speeds are nice too, when downloading OS updates or games, but we think it will be the upload speed that is most noticeably useful within our demographic."

The costs (at least until the trial ends) will be simply £10 added to the existing A&A pricing for FTTC. A&A will cover the cost of the install/migration on an existing phone line (ie FREE install), and a discounted ZyXEL VMG3925 is available for £25. The installation will be carried out by an Openreach engineer who will provide the modem (A Huawei MT992).

At present the coverage for G.Fast is fairly minimal, but Openreach say they are going to be rolling out service to many more locations soon; especially those which do not have an FTTP footprint.

It should be noted that these headline speeds are really only going to be available where the street cabinet is fairly close to your premises. If your cabinet is within few hundred metres then you are likely to see improvement in speeds over FTTC.