Andrews & Arnold have different usage rates for peak vs. off-peak times.

Since I started working from home, my Internet usage during the day has sky-rocketed. I would, therefore, like to generate some pretty charts / reports that show me which HTTP / SSH / whatever connections are contributing the most to my usage total, so that I can better understand my usage.

My router is running OpenWRT, so all of that information should be available somewhere, but I'm looking for software recommendations.

Thoughts?

Cris and I managed to rack up £100 of usage in one day when one of his rsync jobs went batshit. I think if I was working from home I'd have to give A&A the push, either that or get my employer to pay for another line.

EDIT: What about their new home tariff?

Granted, they are expensive, but also very reliable. Since I need the Internet connection to get any work done, I'm hesitant to move to anyone else.



As far as I can tell from looking at the HMRC rules, I wouldn't actually be able to expense that, since I could work from the office.



I've just dropped sales@aa an email to see if they can figure out a better tariff for me.

But are they actually more reliable than anyone else out there? They use the same exchange equipment s most other providers, on the same copper lines.

I was pretty shocked that it's possible to rack up over £100 in excess bandwidth charges in one day without any warning or cap from them. Seems very unreasonable to me. It appears the mistake was down to my server, so I am happy to pay if those are the rules, but I personally wouldn't touch A&A with a barge pole in future.

Just moved to plus.net myself and their business support seems pretty good, you can also add enhanced care packages to get even faster turn around. I shifted 375Gb in the first month on their unlimited package and they don't seem bothered!

Cheers

Cris

The reason I ended up on A&A in the first place was that I got basically evicted from several ISPs, including PlusNet due to high usage levels. But that was many years ago now.

One of the reasons I'm still with A&A is that I accidentally ended up 32 IP addresses Which have proved very useful over the years and their values are baked into various customers VPNs and firewalls, which makes the idea of losing them painful.

When there is a fault A&A do still seem to be more forceful at pushing the right bit of BT to pull their finger out. It helps that they have they constant line monitoring in place which still seems to be fairly unique within the industry.

I do pay a sizable premium for it though

http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/vnstat ?
http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/bwmon ?

Haven't used them personally though.

Oh don't get me wrong, I continue to be amazed by their service, but they are bloody expensive.

I don't know what your employment arrangements are, but in my last job, we paid for a number of ADSL connections at peoples homes. Usually on the pretence that they might need to VPN into work and needed an internet connection at home to do so. Ironically, these people were also the highest paid so could've easily afforded their own broadband, but hey, the perks of senior management.

Other than the proactive monitoring, on a single line, the service probably isn't more reliable. But when you buy their office product using both BT and TalkTalk's backhaul networks with the option of 3G backup. All from the same supplier, with one block of addresses for all of them, all with seamless failover. Then you're looking at a product that should be more reliable. I doubt there are many mainstream ISP's that offer that sort of reliability in a product without charging a similar sort of premium.

I moved to A&A because primarily they were the only people offering FTTC where I lived. BT themselves swore blind I couldn't get it for nigh on 18 months. Also, hearing nothing but great things about their customer service made me feel less worried, especially compared with having to ring India every time I had a problem with my Nildram ADSL service. I just wanted to fscking shoot myself every time I had to ring them.

I'd forgotten about the 3G side. It was very handy when we were homeless for 2 weeks and then during the 2 week wait for FTTC to be installed.

Still having my own static IP addresses stopped me from being cut off from various customer systems. A very niche requirement of course though...

I may well be tempted to move to Zen or PlusNet when my 12 month minimum FTTC term is up though.

That would be a perfect example of the A&A difference. They are actually better at navigating the BT systems than BT are themselves !

(far from the first example of something like that I've heard)

Yep. Moved to Home::1 tariff. Back to paying what I was previously paying, with a 100GB/month allowance, which I'm unlikely to exceed (I'm doing about 45-50GB/month at the moment).

And the fact that they could do that over email with no hassle, within 4 hours of my original request, is one reason why they get good customer service ratings.

Still expensive, though.

Wow. What kind of speeds do you get for those packages?

That all depends on where you live, will range from 512/400 - 80,000/20,000 (or in fact faster in a very small number of places where BT are trailing fibre to the premises).

FTTC, 40/10Mbit/s. Currently getting about 38Mbit/s. 80/20 is another £5/month.

If I wasn't moving a tonne of data in the middle of the night, I'd be on Home::1 as well.

Okay, same kind of ball park as here on CableTV wiring (DOCSIS 3.0). I pay $70/month for 48/10 w/300GB, plus unlimited transfers from 2am-8am EST each night.

Another $20 bumps that up to 150/10 w/400GB.

My relatives back home in New Brunswick have FTTH, 75/75 for about $50-60/month, with unlimited data allowances.

Cheers

UK broadband is weird. It seems to be run by sheep.

A few years ago it was all unlimited, then a couple of years later it was all limited and now we pretty much seem to be back to unlimited.

What unlimited means will obviously vary from provider to provider and some are more unlimited than others.

I'm on 120/10 (cable) and I get a decent service all the time, I couldn't tell you how much data I actually use because despite the router being connected for 22 days, it says I've only downloaded 2.1GB....and I downloaded a 2.5GB file yesterday...it's clearly lying. I pay 70 UKP for this which includes our phone line with free unlimited anytime calls (ex mobile & international) and our cable TV (2 TiVo boxes).

I've played musical ISPs like many of the guys in this thread, nildram, plusnet (pretty much left before they kicked me off - this was a number of years ago when they basically destroyed their service with stealth traffic shaping and changing of service levels), bt and sky. Been with virgin for a few years now and have no regrets.

Adrian

Is this even relevant any more? I almost never use the land line to make calls these days. Am I the only one?

I'm so jealous. So you've had five ISPs? In the US, you're extremely fortunate to have more than two broadband options in any given area, and most of the time one of those is going to be DSL. Where I live, I can go with Verizon Fios, Cox Cable, or probably some Verizon DSL service and that's it. Other places might add in ATT UVerse but that's pretty much it.

I'm currently on Fios, but despite the fast speeds I hate it. I get 50/30Mbps, but they clearly do some pretty awful stuff with Youtube traffic. It's so bad that I've had to go in and block some IPs in the router setup so that I'd get routed around to a decent connection with Google's servers. Otherwise I'm lucky if I can watch 240p streams. It's horrible, and they won't admit they're doing it. So what's my recourse? I have one cable company I can try and that's it. If they also do it, I have nowhere else to go...

Over here, mobile usage is still priced very high, whereas landlines typically are just a flat monthly rate for local calls, so the latter is often preferred, especially for long distance and/or long duration calls.

But many of us have long since ditched the traditional land-line circuits, in favour of Voip adapters (ATAs) plugged into our broadband internet connections. I pay about $1.50/month for an inbound number (DID) with every calling feature imaginable (including voicemail), and $0.01/minute to use it for calls anywhere to/from USA/Canada. And somewhat more (but still cheap) for the rest of the planet.

Cheers

I have a choice between Cox and CenturyLink. Cox service was beyond horrible, and with CenturyLink the fastest I can get is 14/10 Mbit.

I haven't heard of any FIOS issues from my friends in Cali, they all love it. I wonder if that is just an east coast issue?

No, you are not. Two (TWO!) landline voice lines came with my data link contract. I haven't learned their numbers, since 2006.