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.
We’re pleased to announce some new functions available to customers in our unique customer portal.
Broadband users can now see their usage data with the Bandwidth Gem, and web hosting customers now have the option of using a web-based File Manager to upload, zip, unzip and edit files on their sites.
We’ll have a quick look at these gems now, and at the end some technical details on their creation, and finally give details of how to enable them.
Bandwidth Gem
This gem gives broadband customers are live view of their bandwidth use.
Broadband Usage Gem
The main guage shows how much data has been transferred in the given month. In the example above, a mere 408MB! Also shown is the allowance, if the user has one. We offer a variety of broadband services with allowances and unlimited. Even for accounts which have an allowance, we include off-peak periods where usage is not counted towards allowance.
ADSL, ADSL2+, Fibre to Cabinet (FTTC) and Fibre to Premises (FTTP).
Annex M (increased upload speed) available.
The gem shows the usage in Peak and Off-Peak periods. Depending on whether the plan is Family or Business, an off-peak time period is given where bandwidth usage is uncharged. Traffic prioritisation is also given to Family overnight, and Business during the day (08:00 – 20:00) Mon-Fri.
FileManager Gem
The filemanager gem is at heart a web based FTP client. In non-technical terms, this means customers can manage the files on their webspace using just a web browser. The gem is accessed via the customer portal, and logs in to the chosen web hosting account.
Once active, customers have complete control over all files on their site.
FileManager Gem Features
Upload, Download, Create, Edit and Delete files.
Copy, Move, Delete directories.
Calculate the size of directories and files.
Zip folders and download them in single action.
Upload zip files and unpack them automatically.
For the developers amongst our customers, the gem includes a code editor with syntax highlighting. Perfect for the quick update whilst out and about.
2020Media’s hosting plans include compatibility with ASP.Net and PHP based software, as well as specialist services on Joomla, Drupal and WordPress, amongst others.
Technical Notes – bandwidth gem
Our bandwidth gem is custom written but utilises a XML feed of the raw data from the broadband accounting servers. Once the data has been pulled into an array using simplexml_load_string, we parse it with the PHP explode() function
Now that the data can be easily access as variables, we use Google Chart tools to create a user-friendly representation of the bandwidth usage, and a horizontal bar graph courtesy of of RGraph. Both libraries are based on HTML5/SVG technology (adopting VML for old IE versions), so no plugins are required.
We ran into one conundrum – if the broadband user is on an unlimited package, how could we display their usage in a meaningful way? We thought the guage was the best graphical representation, but what should the scale be? In the end, we decided that a log 10 scale would work best, with a very high notional upper limit that is based on theoritical maximums on typical ADSL2 line speeds. This allowed the guage to show the needle position increasing with usage, but scaled nicely for both high and low usage scenarios. A forum post pointed the way to do this: http://jsfiddle.net/asgallant/Ldy6V/ using Google visualization DataView functions.
Activate Gems
We appreciate not all customers want access to their site files to be even theoretically available so we enable the FileManager gem on request.
The (read-only) broadband usage gem is enabled on all our broadband customers accounts and is active now.
A central London network node belonging to BT disastrously flooded and caught fire yesterday.
The incident at Burne House in north Paddington affected landlines, broadband and mobile services across the west of London. Over 400 local exchanges are connected from this site, so connectivity was also affected across the south east and further afield.
“The flood water has been removed from the exchange building overnight and power supply has begun to be restored,” BT said this morning.
“We are now beginning to restore communications services to customers and this work will continue throughout the day.”
The impact of the great torrent/inferno was even felt on the continent. There have been reports that roaming for Vodafone, O2 and 3 customers in Austria is currently down, with operators pointing the finger at Paddington.
Last week we had the opportunity to catch up with our fellow network operators. Amongst the interesting topics discussed were IP address depletion updates – suggestions that broadband providers might NAT their entire customer bases!
As most users have NAT on their broadband already, this effectively means double NAT – if you rely on a fixed IP address to the outside world, this has major consequences.
We also enjoyed a humourous talk on care of fibre optic cables. Unfortunately the detailed warnings on only using specialised cleaning equipment costing thousands of dollars was left a little deflated after a quick wipe on someone’s jeans gave excellent results!
From dirty to clean via trousers
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