UK’s PSTN network phase out gains momentum

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Openreach’s progression to phase out the PSTN network as “End of Life” and cease it by 2025 has picked up speed, with new test switch off locations revealed.

The network subsidiary of BT have continued their transfer of customers away from legacy analogue Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to a new fully digital network. The rollout aims to shift all clients to phone lines operating on the Internet Protocol (IP) route by 2025.

A list of services being decommissioned include analogue phone lines, ADSL and FTTC ‘superfast’ broadband connections, ISDN phone lines and other services such as traffic lights, motorway signs, analogue fax and alarms lines.

The IP routing system is in correlation with the nation-wide shift to fibre to the premise (FTTP) broadband to around 15 million homes and businesses that will rely on fibre optic cabling for the entire journey from the exchange.

Although 2025 feels a long time away, many businesses have already made the switch to an all-digital model with their communications setup moving to the cloud, calls being conducted over IP routing and enabling the opportunity for advanced video calling.

Lineal are here to make this migration over to a digital future as smooth as possible. Check with us to assess which analogue phone line services your business or organisation still uses and to find out whether your area is part of a published FTTP roll out in the near future.

Additionally, Openreach have announced 86 new copper network switch-off locations covering approximately 500,000 UK premises. This marks a rapid expansion from the original two test locations of Mildenhall and Salisbury where legacy PTSN services and its associated WLR hardware were removed from the commercial market.

James Lilley, director of managed customer migrations at Openreach stated that “ultimately, the plan is to withdraw all services that rely on the old PSTN by December 2025 and, from that point on, communications providers will own the delivery of voice services. We are upgrading the UK’s digital infrastructure as we build our full-fibre network to 25 million homes and businesses by 2026”.

To learn more about how Lineal can help your business or organisation’s migration to the digital future, follow the link for details or drop us a message on [email protected]

Fastly internet outages affecting Europe and North America

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A number of retail, news and social media websites experienced internet downtime caused by an outage at the global website cloud hosting service, Fastly.

For an hour from 11am BST today, users of Fastly’s hosting service including gov.uk, PayPal, Amazon and a whole host of other major company websites were greeted with and “Error 503 Service Unavailable” detailing problems with the cache server.

By 12.09pm BST, Fastly released a statement saying that their global network was coming back online and that it had been “investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN [content delivery network] services”. However, users were still met with slow loading times and sporadic access to multiple companies’ websites.

Error 503 message that greeted those trying to access the affected websites

When functioning correctly, CDNs such as Fastly aim to improve website security from denial-of-service attacks and reduce loading time for images, videos and HTML pages whilst managing sudden web traffic clusters for their customers’ websites.

ESET commented on the outage and its implication going forward with “whether it be malicious or otherwise, this highlights the importance and significance of these vast hosting companies and what they represent” – adding weight to the growing responsibility that these CDN providers have over global Internet control and access.

The outage raises security concerns over the over-centralisation of the internet in the hands of a few major hosting providers and asks questions about its reliability in the future should a larger scale problem like this occur again – demonstrating that we have not learned our lesson from the past hosting service outages as exemplified by the Cloudfare crash of 2019.

Full list of all websites affected below:

AFR, Age, Amazon, Boots, BuzzFeed, CNN, Deliveroo, Etsy, Evening Standard, Financial Times, Giphy, Horse and Hound, IGN, Imgur, Independent, Kickstarter, Le Monde, New York Times, PayPal, Pinterest, Reddit, Royal Mail, SMH, Spotify, Taboola, The Guardian, The Verge, Twitch, Twitter, UK Government website (including HM Revenue and Customs), Vimeo and Weightwatchers

 

End Net Neutrality, rules FCC

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Net Neutrality looks set to end in the USA, following a landmark 3-2 decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC.)

The ruling will permit American internet providers to cease treating all internet traffic equally, and permit the blocking or throttling of certain types of internet traffic or charging for access non-uniformly – providing the restrictions are released publicly.

Opponents of Net Neutrality fear the lifting of restrictions will pave the way for anti-competitive behavior in the US and ultimately around the world – with internet service providers (ISPs) deliberately impairing services provided by competitors to make their own offering appear superior. Imagine ISPs degrading each other’s parent-company video streaming services, and you get the picture.

This latest ruling u-turns on the 2015 decision to guard against anti-competitive practices, and will be politically controversial – passed strictly down party lines with the committee’s three Republicans, including Trump-appointed Chairman and former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai voting in favour, and two Democrats voting against.

Consumer protection has, if anything, become slightly stricter in the UK following recent Ofcom decisions, whilst across the pond, 2017 is expected to go down in internet history as a year of dramatic internet deregulation. Internet usage crosses national borders of course, with the international affect of the FCC’s decision being ours to speculate on.

The end of Net Neutrality won’t kill the internet, but it’s likely some intelligent individuals will be developing discretely advantageous ways for their own business interests to benefit financially from preferential treatment online, or profit from those who wish to do so.

Long term, any introduction of ‘toll-road’ style access is likely to act as a barrier to entry to newer technology companies, to the benefit of more established providers.

Firefox Quantum is fast (really fast.)

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Firefox Quantum has been released to the world, in Mozilla’s biggest browser release since 2004.

Mozilla’s newest version of their flagship open-source browser project is by far the fastest ever version, with a visibly quicker, crisp style and 30% less memory usage than Chrome. In a subtle nod to Microsoft Edge’s fading promise, the project claims the new Browser will be fast ‘For Good.’

Lineal’s team have been impressed by how jaw-dropingly quick the new browser is. Strip back the home screen to nothing but a search bar and jumping to your first optimised web-page is like turning the page of a book – the kind of responsiveness Google say they want to one day achieve with Chrome.

And Firefox must stand up to Chrome. Google’s own web-browser has become the closest thing to an internet standard since competition rules finally punctured Internet Explorer’s dominance in the mid 2000s.

Chrome’s flat-packaged browser now accounts for around 60% of all normal web use, and increasingly eclipses major rivals like Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari. This level of conformity may be unhelpful – just as Microsoft’s old defacto-monopoly of the browser market arguably prevented Internet Explorer from developing, to the detriment of web users, so Google Chrome’s dominance needs to be challenged. If not by Firefox, then whom?

Not comprehensively challenged, sadly: Firefox Quantum moves Mozilla from using Yahoo! search by default, to using Google, where the search giant is even further ahead. Mozilla will also inevitably fall far behind Google on mobile, where it runs on under 1% of devices thanks in part to Google’s own development of the Android platform.

Nevertheless a super-fast, community-driven browser for the future of the Internet (even on desktop) really is a breath of fresh air.

Firefox Quantum is available from the non-profit Mozilla’s website for Windows, Mac and Linux.

 

For IT Support and expertise – contact our team today: 01271 375999

Compensation for Broadband faults, Ofcom rules

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Communications regulator Ofcom has ruled that automatic compensation for broadband faults will be available to customers experiencing service faults.

Customers of BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Zen internet (roughly 90% of UK customers) will be able to claim £8 per day for disconnections not fixed after 2 days, £5 for delayed repairs, and £25 for scheduled engineer visits which do not happen.

Ofcom estimates automatic pay-outs could exceed £142m annually, considerably more than the estimated 15% of claims currently paid out by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) each year.

The new system has been designed to improve service delivery, encourage users to report problems, and incentivise ISPs to keep a tighter control of faults.

Customers will be expected to follow a complaints procedure to receive compensation – revised guidance will be published in advance of the changes coming into effect in 2019. Existing rules detailing what types of faults should currently be referred to your ISP are available here. 

As before, compensation is not expected to cover internal network or internet connection delivery problems at a property, with BT levelling charges on customers who request unnecessary engineer call-outs.

Broadband customers can learn more about their statutory rights on Ofcom’s website here.

Need IT Support? – call Lineal’s experienced team today.

Broadband speed advertising reviewed by Ofcom

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A public consultation on broadband speed and delivery is being conducted by Ofcom until 10th November, as the regulator seeks to hold Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to account.

Ofcom currently requires ISPs to provide an estimated download speed the end user will receive in product advertising.

Providers typically advertise possible broadband speed with the phase ‘up to’, rather than guarantee a deliverable lesser service level (very difficult) although under new rules may be asked to express this as a form of average to more accurately reflect the broadband speeds experienced by the majority of customers.

The consultation is part of a trend in recent years for regulators to tighten up broadband speed advertising rules, and eliminate the more misleading claims sometimes used by ISPs to imply a better quality internet service – as Virgin Media found out to its cost, when a series of adverts featuring Jamaican Sprinter Usain Bolt and several unsubstantiated phrases such as “bye-bye to buffering” were blocked by the Advertising Standards Authority.

Subject to the findings of the consultation, new rules are expected to give consumers the right to terminate their broadband contracts without penalty should their provider not be able to guarantee the minimum standard of service on which the contract was sold.

Exactly what that ‘minimum standard’ should be in future hasn’t yet been made clear. Very few users will receive the perfect 80Mbps download speed theoretically granted to them from super-fast fibre in 80:20 enabled-areas, but to what extent the service will be degraded largely depends on copper-wired distance from the nearest fibre-enabled BT cabinet to each customer’s router.

Businesses seeking a required level of connectivity may opt for a dedicated leased line with higher data allowances – although these carry waiting periods for installation, and are not a cost-effective option for an individual domestic consumer.

Although device recorded internet speeds may indeed depend on a number of factors, users can perform a like-for-like test of both their upload and download speeds using Ookla’s internet speed-test app on Lineal’s website.

 

For connectivity advice and communications expertise: speak to Lineal today.

Lineal Director escorts PM David Cameron around FSB show tent

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FSB Chairman for North Devon, Mike Matthews, spent 25 minutes with Prime Minister David Cameron, Agricultural Minister Owen Patterson and PPC Peter Heaton-Jones, guiding them around the FSB tent at the North Devon Show on Wednesday 7th August.  They discussed problems for small business owners and the role of the Federation of Small Businesses.

David Cameron and Mike Matthews can be seen talking to Grace Rodgers at her table displaying products from her Bideford company – On The Horizon.

The FSB show tent was one of 2 chosen by the Prime Minister at the North Devon show yesterday.  Mike Matthews, who is Managing Director of IT company Lineal Software Solutions, had organised the tent to showcase a variety of North Devon Businesses and their products / services.  Mike took the PM and other VIPs around the displays, introducing them to the FSB members and highlighting the problems faced by small businesses in North Devon today.

Mike Matthews said “It has been 25 years since I first set up Lineal so that I could concentrate on the development of my business software SQLWorks.  The rural location of North Devon has its benefits, but manufacturing problems, increasing employment issues and the slow roll out of superfast broadband have all been seen as barriers to growth by the FSB members.”

At his party’s spring conference, David Cameron said “There’s only one strategy for growth we can have now and that is rolling up our sleeves and doing everything possible to make it easier for businesses to grow, to invest, to take people on….Back small firms. Boost enterprise. Be on the side of everyone in this country who wants to create jobs, and wealth and opportunity.”

Agricultural Minister, Owen Patterson, also accompanied David Cameron and Mike Matthews.  His interest was in the rural location and nature of many local businesses.  They discussed the obstacles presented to them, and how they are overcome with help from organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses.