We were literally trying to get them to work through a set up procedure they had somehow forgotten to do - on Christmas Eve, which was at least a week later than it should have been.

A&A have a good rep among geeks but they seemed expensive and I've never used them.

The best service I had in the UK was with Virgin (on local coax). Apparently their customer service is pretty poor. But aside from the occasional random outage the service mostly just worked, and at the advertised speeds.