Category Archives: Technical

Technical

No New Phone Lines?

The UK is preparing for a huge technological change. By the end of 2025, the historic analogue network, used to make most phone calls from our landlines and also used for broadband, will have reached the end of its life. And a new digital phone network is taking its place.

The new network will provide a future proof, more reliable and dependable broadband service that will support the UK for decades to come.

The upgrade to a digital line supports the next generation of voice calls – higher quality, fewer faults and less maintenance, as well as being better for the environment. Landlines are going digital across the UK.

This means voice calls will soon be over a digital line – in the same way broadband works.

This change will affect almost everything that currently plugs into an analogue telephone wall socket. This includes any equipment that may be provided to clients and customers, or equipment they purchase to utilise the services on offer.

To manage this, 2020Media will no longer offer analogue phone lines after 31st August 2023. This also affects services over analogue phone lines such as ADSL.

Instead, 2020Media will offer a new product called “SoGEA” which is equivalent to Fibre to the Cabinet  (FTTC). This offers high speed internet without the seperate cost of a phone line.

Telephony service will move to a Voice over IP solution, commonly known as VOIP.

 

 

Technical

Enterprise & IPv6 Workshop – UK IPv6 Council

On 24th April 2023, a team of technical staff from 2020Media attended an Enterprise and IPv6 Workshop organised by the UK IPv6 Council at the Morgan Stanley Conference Centre in London. The workshop was aimed at helping enterprises understand and adopt IPv6, the latest version of the Internet Protocol that offers many benefits over the current IPv4.

The workshop featured a series of talks from experts and practitioners who shared their insights and experiences on various aspects of IPv6, such as address planning, security, applications, cloud, Kubernetes, IoT and case studies. The 2020Media team learned about the latest news on IPv6 adoption and technical challenges, as well as best practices and tips for a successful transition.

IPv6 talk
IPv6 Security & Mythbusting – Fernando Gont (SI6 Networks)

The workshop also provided an opportunity for networking and knowledge exchange with other attendees from different sectors and backgrounds who are interested in or working on IPv6 deployment. The 2020Media team enjoyed the lively discussions and interactions with the speakers and peers, and gained valuable feedback and suggestions for their own IPv6 projects.

The 2020Media team would like to thank the UK IPv6 Council for organising this informative and engaging workshop, and Morgan Stanley for hosting it at their impressive venue. The team is looking forward to applying what they learned at the workshop to their own work and contributing to the IPv6 community in the UK.

Slides from the presentations can be found at : Enterprise & IPv6 Workshop – UK IPv6 Council

Technical

Joomla  4 Celebration – User Group Meetup

If you build websites using Joomla, head over to a special online event marking the release of Joomla 4, held by the Joomla User Group, JoomlaLondon

This event includes involvment from the Release leads from 4.0, 4,1 as well as appearances by key figures from Joomla 3 and 5! If that wasn’t enough, Robert Deutz, President of Joomla! will also be attending.

The evening will start at 19:00 UTC. That’s 19:00 GMT for those in the UK.

Registration:

https://www.joomlalondon.co.uk/jugl

A reminder that 2020Media provides Joomla Hosting and ongoing Tech Support for Joomla sites. Check out our plans at https://www.2020media.com/web-hosting/shared-hosting/joomla-hosting/

Technical

WordPress 5.5.1 Fixes Millions of Broken Sites

WordPress publishes new information that describes why WordPress 5.5 negatively affected millions of websites, a staggering amount. WordPress is publishing a maintenance release, version 5.5.1. It is designed to serve as a patch to give time for plugin and theme developers to update their software.

The announcement about what went wrong linkes to a spreadsheet naming hundreds of plugins and themes that were affected.

The spreadsheet also notes what the specific issue is for each plugin and theme, which will help software developers fix their plugins and themes.

Read more: WordPress 5.5.1 Fixes Millions of Broken Sites

2020Media’s Managed WordPress service is run by experts who know that major new releases can cause issues like this, and took the decision NOT to upgrade sites to 5.5 and therefore sites were not broken by the original release. We’ll be testing this new 5.5.1 release before rolling it out.

Read more about our Managed WordPress Service.

Technical

Approaching IPv4 Run-out

The body responsible for handing out IPv4 IP Addresses in Europe and the Middle East, RIPE NCC has today given an update on the expected final depletion of their stock of IPv4 internet addresses.

IPv4 internet address look like 123.123.123.123 and are an essential part of today’s internet. Every device on the internet needs to have an address so that other devices and services can communicate with it. The next generation address system, called IPv6, is slowly growing in adoption but there are still many devices that cannot communicate with devices using the new IPv6 address system. For that reason IPv4 addresses are still sought after, especially by new ISPs, who want to ensure their customers can access every system on the internet.

The update from RIPE NCC predicts that blocks of /22 IPV4 addresses will no longer be available from November 2019, just a month away at the time of writing this post. A /22 is 1,024 IPv4 addresses, and is typically considered the minimum routable size of a block.

Work-Arounds and Options

RIPE NCC still have a million IPv4 addresses available but not in continous 1024 blocks. So they will still help new entrants but they will get non-contigous ranges of IPv4 addresses. RIPE NCC also operate a waiting list – so if IPv4 addresses are handed back, they can be recycled for new ISPs.

Another option is the private market  – IPv4 addresses are traded for-profit as they have now achieved a value due to scarcity. At the time of writing, a single IPv4 address is worth about $1.

IPv4 addresses are shared out amongst different geographical areas – some regions in the world have already run out, but some still have reserves – providers can set up local presence in a region that has reserves to obtain IPv4 address space.

Long Term Solution

The new address space, called IPv6, is the long term solution. In fact it is already adopted by all major internet service providers and content providers. So if you use a modern device, and visit the typical popular websites you could well be using IPv6 already and not know about it. But one day, if you are search for some obscure site or have decided to turn on an ancient computer, don’t be surprised if things don’t work like they used to….