Cyber-attack hits UK internet phone providers

[AGTDenton]

If any of you use services like Voipfone, they have been down for four days due to a cyber attack.
Apparently our office has been nice and quiet.

An "unprecedented" and co-ordinated cyber-attack has struck multiple UK-based providers of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services, according to an industry body.

Industry body Comms Council UK said several of its members had been targeted by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in recent weeks.

"An overall threat has been made to the entire industry," a spokesman added.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59053876

[ik9000]

and yet new builds are no longer automatically to get RJ11 analogue cables. The guidance now is to provide FTTP/FTTC and encourage use of VOIP telephony. It always strikes me as odd why you wouldn't stick in both if you're going to the trouble of getting something to the house. I recall visiting a Kiwi lady who after the big earthquake was able to "use the old copper line to call out while all the neighbours had no mobile/other means". Maintaining a redundancy is no bad thing. In the Egyptian arab spring protest thing the gov shut off the broadband and it was people with old dial-up modems who could get the news out and keep abrest of what was going on.

Keep RJ11 even if just for calling your grandparents. You never know when you might need it. I guess if you're the provider the back-end costs and space requirements are something you'd want to ditch, but should we be letting them? It's not like they ever seem to pass those savings onto us.

[DDY]

and yet new builds are no longer automatically to get RJ11 analogue cables. The guidance now is to provide FTTP/FTTC and encourage use of VOIP telephony. It always strikes me as odd why you wouldn't stick in both if you're going to the trouble of getting something to the house.

I'd imagine it's because mostly because analogue telephone services will be completely withdrawn in 2025. It doesn't really make sense to install all the infrastructure needed to run a line in to a new house when it's going to be useless in a few years - especially if only a few people will actually sign up for a landline phone service.

[ik9000]

but why is the infrastructure going to be completely withdrawn? Isn't it pretty good at what it does - ie a phoneline? Do we really think rurual communities will have decent broadband by then? Or is the kit at the exchanges just horribly big and obsolete and too big to retain?

[DDY]

but why is the infrastructure going to be completely withdrawn? Isn't it pretty good at what it does - ie a phoneline? Do we really think rurual communities will have decent broadband by then? Or is the kit at the exchanges just horribly big and obsolete and too big to retain?

I can't speak for BT or Openreach, but from the perspective of the utility company I work for there are a good few reasons.

Many of our assets are old, I mean really old, some from the 19th century which are still key parts of the service we provide. As telephone technology developed and spread we started to monitor and control sites via the PSTN and later also ISDN networks, with some really remote sites actually adopting radio or even satellite communication because long telephone lines would be too unreliable. Maintaining the old copper lines is costly because they are of course old and infrastructure intensive – big switching facilities, big cables, etc, the need to keep the old stuff running while upgrading or maintain it adds another layer of complexity.

Now that digital communications technologies; broadband via copper and fibre, and mobile-type, GSM, 5G etc, have become widespread and actually more reliable than the copper lines, we’ve started in the 2000s to swap kit over to digital comms. By now, thousands of our sites formerly connected by analogue copper lines have switched over to digital and only a small fraction are still on analogue lines and are due to be switched over in the coming year or two in time for the 2025 switch-off.

We’ve seen substantially fewer comms issues after the switch to digital, plus it’s cheaper and easier to install and maintain. For example, if the PSTN line to some site died, we’d need our operative guys with Openreach out to diagnose everything from the site to the exchange, now we just send someone over to swap out the 5G comms box.

Also, digital of course gives us quite a lot more capability than analogue.

Moving over to digital is a no-brainer win-win for us and I would guess that BT and Openreach feel the same about their network – old, difficult and costly to maintain, with fewer-and-fewer subscribers becomes economically unfeasible to keep running, digital wins.

EDIT: On the reliability thing. When there’s a storm we actually plan and expect a few PSTN lines to our sites to fail. To be fair we also plan and expect the same for digital but pretty much just ISDN and copper broadband. I joined the company when most of the kit had already switched to digital – I could only imagine how many sites would lose comms when it was all analogue!

[kalniel]

but why is the infrastructure going to be completely withdrawn? Isn't it pretty good at what it does - ie a phoneline? Do we really think rurual communities will have decent broadband by then? Or is the kit at the exchanges just horribly big and obsolete and too big to retain?

I guess cellular is the back up and coverage is pretty good these days.

[ik9000]

I guess cellular is the back up and coverage is pretty good these days.

yet cellular and broadband are increasingly shrinking and merging so it's not an alternative, just a package from the same provider, and I wager reliant on at least some of the same kit somewhere along the chain.

[AGTDenton]

If I recall somewhere around 2014-2018 there was a data centre failure that disrupted mobile & internet communications. I believe something DNS related failed catastrophically in Birmingham and a vast number of people were affected across the country. What surprised me was the lack of redundancy when it's drilled into us during training.

And just an update on Voipfone, they still have DDos issues over a week later.
Https://www.voipfonestatus.co.uk

[kalniel]

yet cellular and broadband are increasingly shrinking and merging so it's not an alternative, just a package from the same provider, and I wager reliant on at least some of the same kit somewhere along the chain.

Not while we still have voice over cellular. If we go down VOIP over cellular too then agreed, it's just as vulnerable.