I wish these guys were my ISP. Although it won’t be news to Irreal’s European readers, Americans may not be aware that British PM David Cameron is pushing a plan to have ISPs filter pornography. Originally, the plan called for an opt out but the ISPs insisted on opt in. Andrews & Arnold, on the other hand, aren’t having any of it. They say that if you want a censored network connection you should move to North Korea or at least seek out another ISP because they aren’t providing any filtering.
That, right there, is enough to get them the Irreal seal of approval but it gets better. They point out that it’s not up to them to censor your Internet connection. That’s something that’s up to individual users to provide for themselves. And by the way, NAT? No they don’t do that either. They think every computer should have it’s own IP address. Now that IPv4 addresses have run out they may be able to deliver only a single IP address to the user who may NAT internally but Andrews & Arnold don’t use it at all. Your IP address remains fixed. If you use IPv6 they provide a /40 block to allocate as you like.
The logging that they do is for network engineering purposes and they make it possible for you to avoid it if you wish. They don’t currently have any monitoring devices on their network and will resist being ordered to install them. The director says that users should feel free to ask him if they have been forced to install them, and says that if he refuses to answer you should draw the appropriate inferences.
All in all, Andrews & Arnold appear to treat their users they way they would want to be treated. Read their policies at the link to see what I mean. It’s a source of sorrow to me that more ISPs (and especially those in the U.S.) don’t do as well.