Phones and the internet

[paulears]

A while back, people were talking about theatre phone systems and how it works (or not) in a power cut.

I lost my fibre internet at home this morning - they dug our streets up and connected the town a year or so ago, so I took the offer of fibre to the home and have had 500+ speeds for a year. Until today when it went dead. Then after attempts to reboot and make things happen to restore the 'service ok' LED, Royal Mail delivered a letter from the fibre supplier warning me Air Broadband are likely to cease service and telling me to sign up with somebody else, pronto. Two hours too late. I'm now without internet till the 28th. 

 

My burglar alarm noticed it and sent me a message saying it was running on cellular. Otherwise I would have not realised early this morning it had gone.

 

It means my phone line is also dead, as that was now VOIP -as every phone will have to be soon when the old network is switched off. Most businesses are now using advanced features via VOIP. What happens if a venue like a theatre suddenly loses internet access. No phones to trigger the fire brigade, the police, no booking office, no safety systems. If the network dies the simplest tasks now stop dead. I can work from home or the office because I have a NAS drive that allows me to access everything from both locations, but not for three weeks. As this morning I'd been editing video in the office, my EE data for the month has gone as the computers here are trying to bring in 10Gb of video and audio. I really had not thought about this. My landline number won't ring - the voip system is of course not working. My bank locked me out of both the mobile app and the desktop web access because of network slo speed issues using the tethered phone - EE don't stop your data when it runs out, they just throttle it. 

 

Nothing I can do if the firm went bust - 13 million customers with a staff of less than two dozen I'm told. I'm just shocked how little I can do, work wise. I'll have to actually go into the office to reset my banking. We rely so much on networks nowadays. In the company who supplied me, there were 8 directors and they've been resigning since November - but I didn't know.

 

How internet safe are you?

[GaryNattrass]

Ah the joys of modern telecoms post BT sell off in the 80's.

We have so much choice now don't we ??? but that copper bell wire is still the most prevalent system of transmission until Open Reach get around to digging up your street like the cable people did in the 1990's.

I ditched my landline 10 years ago now as got sick of paying BT, SKY et all £40 a month for 350k broadband and now pay Three £15 a month for a 4G router and around 20-30 mbs of service.

I have the same system on my boat in London but as it is the beautiful south they actually have 5G available with over 1,000mbs of speed available but as I don't live there Three won't allow me to buy a 5G router for boaty.

No doubt once Open Reach et all have been paid twice to give us all that high speed stuff other countries have had for two decades there will be some new technology invented ala super wifi to connect everyone at last but high speed rail links to Birmingham seem to more of a priority.

😆

 

 

[paulears]

Lowestoft was picked as one of those experimental towns. City fibre have put the purple tubes under EVERY pavement in the town, nearly complete, so when BT could not give me fibre, they could - BUT - I then had to go with random people who could provide service. Wasn't expensive really. The local council are having to redo every pavement because the cables zig zag everywhere. I watched the guy with the trench cutter in the winter just set it off, put hands in pocket to keep warm, and then every now and then, give it a kick to point it away from the kerb or walls.Nowhere did they lay straight trenches. The town is a mess. City fibre's website contact pages has one 'other' category and the rest are 'workmen were rude', 'access to driveway blocked', 'fell into unattained trench' - stuff like that. The irony is the fibre connection boxes are now on top of every BT phone post in town, ready for the pre-made fibres to the homes, but BT cannot use them!

[richard_cooper]

Whilst we’re not in an area that is listed as changing over to fibre anytime soon, we as a theatre have already had to move some services. Our Redcare burglar alarm service was ended so had to move to IP/Mobile. Our phone system was provided via ISDN which we were warned was by BT/Openreach would be switch off “within the next 2 years” about 4 years ago, but still hasn’t! So we switched to VOIP. 

I’m concerned about the loss of service aspect. We’ve still got a working analogue phone line, for the moment, but loss of internet would mean the end of pretty much all business systems, Box Office, finance, membership, incoming telephones and more. I’m currently looking at backup options be it 4/5g or Starlink, but they’re relatively expensive options to backup an internet connection that has gone down for maybe 5 minutes in the last 5 or so years. Another option is to look into tethering a phone to the internet router, as I usually have a decent amount of data left every month, and limiting network use to just the low bandwidth business systems for the duration of the main connection outage.

It’s a real concern that I think we’re only just waking up to. The other aspect from a residential point of view is that these modern VoIP phones need power, so in a power cut?

[kerry davies]

Ah the joys of Thatcherite privatisation. My amazing phone broadband service is "fibre to the cabinet" which in our rural area is on the wall outside the telephone exchange.

As an ex-BT/POEU guy my fury at the government blocking the "glassing of the UK" because of cost and then flogging off BT at a loss greater than that cost hasn't diminished much. 

https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784

[paulears]

I got things running by paying EE for their maximum data package on my phone. My NAS drives spotted it, and transferred all the video files from the office to the NAS - the new package ran out at 10Gb, that's it till the end of the month. Phone defaulted back to minimal data rate, so ok for text, impossible for audio and video files. I can't justify spending more money. I'll just have to live at the office for the next few weeks. Scrapped my home dish, and the aerial is a bit naff, so was getting most TV from t'internet too!

[musht]

Nip down the corner shop and get a PAYG sim with more data on it be initial reaction 😉

Just this week escaped clutches of Virgin after getting the loyal customer kicking, doubled cost after going out of contract, after a 40 minute call cue wait `retentions` had an uphill battle..

Switched to Plusnet, can`t speak highly enough about their customer service, fast to answer and empowered to get things done, on fresh fibre connection. Have BT fibre to rear of building here and City fibre, marketed by Vodafone in Edinburgh and Virgin at front.

Ported geographic landline number to Vonage, because they have been around for  decades. 999 location reporting can now be added, all the usual simultaneous ring on your mobile and other Voip gadgets ,again flawless service.   BT`s  `Digital Voice` offering is laughable.

TBH Virgin connection this side of town has gone down couple of time s in heavy rain, 4G EE via GiffGaff data speed is quite usable here.

Workshop in wonderful West Lothian has been connected via 4G router on 3  via Smarty for last 5 years , going by local reports its been more reliable than the BT fibre in the village it`s beside. It`s fast enough to stream HD CCTV back when needed, only significant outage was when fibre was washed out by canal banks some miles away, knocked out local cell tower for a while, repositioning router in stone building should give it a better view of available towers.

GiffGaff resell EEs network but seem to be significantly cheaper on data, as far remember GiffGaff used to have one of longest time outs before disconnection on PAYG sims, handy for things like alarms that hopefully dont make many calls.

Smarty is a trading name of 3 , but again seem cheaper on data, router on standard Smarty sim . 3`s network uses IP addresses that will forward so ideal for data use. Other networks may do now, but they didn`t a few years ago when mobile data sims were exotic and expensive.

Edited March 11, 2023 by musht

[callumb]

6 hours ago, musht said:

GiffGaff resell EEs network

GiffGaff is O2. 🙂 

[paulears]

I've just spent a frustrating evening in the studio - Cubase 12 pro decided it needed to talk to the Steinberg server to authenticate the library, which of course failed, so I've managed to get the MacBook connected to the phone, and working, and then the MacBook wired into the network, which the studio computer then managed to link to to authenticate itself. So many things you forget about.

[musht]

16 hours ago, callumb said:

GiffGaff is O2. 🙂 

Ah that'll be the one, phone flashes up O2 as carrier before switching to showing Giffgaff.

EE was T Mobile and Orange?

Bit of wall here is last 25 years of internet connection, BT copper landline socket, beside 2 Telewest phone sockets, in daze of dialup Telewest had a cheap deal on a second line, coax from Telewest/Virgin broadband, circa 2000 , emerges from floor beside them, now joined by Openreach/BT fibre box with fragile fibre connection.

Waiting for 5G hardware to drop in cost...

 

 

[dosxuk]

On 3/10/2023 at 10:49 PM, paulears said:

How internet safe are you?

Unless you've got multiple networks into your building, supplied by different suppliers, running on geographically separate routes, there's a simple answer - you're not.

Unless you're a vulnerable customer, or pay through the nose, even with copper lines Openreach won't prioritise a repair to your line if it gets cut, blown down, miswired or any other number of reasons for the line to go dead, and the other network providers aren't much better.

We deal with sites who've had no broadband for weeks while Openreach deal with a tree that's taken their line down, even in central London. We've got another site who recently lost all access for nearly a week after their main fibre and backup vdsl lines were both cut by a digger near their building. Another site relies on 4G connectivity, but all-but-lost that when their local mast was taken out of service for a few days.

And, as you've discovered Paul, even if you've got all that physical separation and redundancy, a failure or collapse at your ISP can still leave you disconnected with significant times to get reconnected.

Loss of internet connectivity really should be a high priority item in business continuity / disaster recovery plans for most businesses these days, unfortunately it seems that the arrival of cheap, easy broadband access has removed the concern about what if it fails from many places, even though the reliance on a working connection has gone through the roof.

[Tomo]

A huge amount of "mass-market" commercial software now relies on an internet connection to check the licence, even if fully locally installed.
It's really quite worrying how reliant even "standalone" software tools have become.

Interestingly my (new) FTTP ISP tells me that Openreach Level 2/2-plus are pointless, as they've historically delivered exactly the same service for Level 1 and the extra payout if it goes down and they miss the SLA is less than the monthly cost difference.

They suggested a PAYG data SIM box as my backup if I didn't want to tether to my smartphone.
There's one-calendar-month 50GB deals for under £20, or "unlimited" (limited to one month) for a bit more.

Though quite what you're supposed to do if you don't have decent mobile coverage after the switchoff is beyond me.

[Paul TC]

5 hours ago, Tomo said:

Though quite what you're supposed to do if you don't have decent mobile coverage after the switchoff is beyond me.

Also there is a limit to the time a mobile phone base station will still operate in a power outage, starting from 0 min, upwards.

[sunray]

1 hour ago, Paul TC said:

Also there is a limit to the time a mobile phone base station will still operate in a power outage, starting from 0 min, upwards.

I'm sure you don't know what you mean by that 🤣🤣🤣

I have unrestricted access to 3 cellphone sites, only 1 has battery backup and for the last 10 years the 4 200Ah batteries cannot be removed from the rack without dismantling as they have swollen so much and the sides have split away, even the battery MCB is switched off. The adjacent and similar rack has never had batteries fitted.

The engineer I spoke to reckoned there is a 20 minute response with generator but a couple of years ago I spent best part of a day there (building maintenance including moving a rack of radio kit/aerial feeders) and the power was off for hours.

Edited March 13, 2023 by sunray

[callumb]

I have a similar home/ office setup as this guy and also did something similar. Thankfully never had to use it. Currently have Virgin Medias 1gig full fibre new network setup fibre to the premises.