Voipfone

The Voipfone service has gone down. Anyone know what the problem is?

https://www.voipfonestatus.co.uk/

See 26 August in "historical".

But they don't say what went wrong.

I've been looking at Voipfone as a supplier for when the move to SOGEA takes place and must admit I would like to know what went wrong.

They make a big thing of having two parallel networks for the ultimate in reliability - or at least that's my understanding - so that when either fails, the other takes up the load.

Obviously something somewhere went seriously wrong this time.

Unfortunately even with multiple levels of resilience and redundancy, things can and do go wrong. Cue the recent large scale CDN outages. Starlink with its 1400 odd satellites, the entire system went down globally for an hour or so on Wednesday.

With any single vendor, at some point there is ‘commonality’ in the food chain which may be impossible to avoid.

If you’re needing that level of resilience it’s often better to have a completely separate, independent system (ie mobile phones in this case) or a separate vendor arrangement. The latter not really typical on domestic service but more typical for business.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

With any single vendor, at some point there is ‘commonality’ in the food chain which may be impossible to avoid.

I agree that if something can go wrong it probably will.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

If you’re needing that level of resilience it’s often better to have a completely separate, independent system (ie mobile phones in this case) or a separate vendor arrangement. The latter not really typical on domestic service but more typical for business.

I don't need that level of resilience, it was simply curiosity as to what had gone wrong despite Voipfone's obvious care in trying to prevent it. There was obviously some single point of failure somewhere which took the whole thing down, I was simply curious as to what happened.

Doubt we will ever know. Commercial confidentiality and all that.....

I sked Voipfone what caused the outage and got this response:

"I don't have the details regarding the outage but believe it was out of our control and a full incident report will be published as soon as it's completed. "

My gripe was really with Voipfone was that their https://www.voipfonestatus.co.uk/ web page failed to acknowledge there was any problems with their network at all, proudly proclaiming a 100% uptime when clearly this was not the case. A day after the event, all their status page had to say was "Network availability. This incident has been resolved. Aug 26, 16:54 - 20:06 BST" - No apology for inconvenience caused and no detail of what went wrong and even worse was that their status page still claimed for the day in question that uptime was 100%!

I feel subscribers are entitled to know comprehensively when there is a problem with any network, with some kind of indication when the service might be restored and not to be mislead on their status page that everything is OK. Otherwise status pages are quite pointless.

But cheeky that. Status page appears as if it was a roughly three hour outage. How long were they out?

O no not again - Voipfone off line from around 15:30

Attempts to logon to them is greeted with:

Network Error
The request timed out while attempting to communicate with the server. This could be because our server is temporarily unavailable or your internet connection may be having problems.

Bad luck, bad management or a bad actor…

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Bad luck, bad management or a bad actor…

So looks like it is a bad actor after all...

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/09/ddos-a...

Indeed, though it does not negate the fact that Voipfone have not had protection in place. Looking at changes to their ASN today, it appears they are racing to sit behind upstream providers who can give them protection, which was clearly missing prior.

It certainly makes you question their network claims, especially as they still make reference on their website to directly be peering with Telewest, NTL, Pipex and Tiscali to name but a few.

There's certainly some very nasty characters out there.

I've just been reading about the various publicised ransomware attacks just in the last two years, 2020 and so far this year

These are the ones that are made public....makes for sobering reading!

TheRegister is saying they've been hit with "colossal ransom demand" possibly from Russian cybercriminal gang REvil.

In reply to a post by Kenneth:

TheRegister is saying they've been hit with "colossal ransom demand" possibly from Russian cybercriminal gang REvil.

My read from this is that both of those providers are quite small and are now working out what to do. Makes me glad I'm using an organisation that has been managing internet traffic for years as a traditional ISP before adding voice services.

"UK Comms Council have communicated to us that other UK SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) providers are affected and identified them as a criminal hacking organisation called REvil who appear to be undertaking planned and organised DDoS attacks against VoIP companies in the UK," he said.

Wonder who the other SIP providers are…?

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Wonder who the other SIP providers are…?

I wonder if they can't say if its gone legal?

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Wonder who the other SIP providers are…?

VoIP Unlimited is another we have come across.

It does make me wonder just how safe the telephone service might be once we all have to move to a VoIP type service. As you get older and more frail a working phone goes from a convenience to a necessity.

The home broadband providers offering phone service do it on a closed network, so it wouldn't be vulnerable to an attack where the method being employed is to DDoS the SIP proxy endpoints with millions of registration attempts. VoIP got a reputation for being far more cost effective than ISDN30 or similar ways of delivering voice, but maybe it's worth looking at having your SIP provided by a private connection if your voice services are critical. Not that it would help much if the infrastructure is shared with public-facing servers.

In reply to a post by jpm:

maybe it's worth looking at having your SIP provided by a private connection if your voice services are critical. Not that it would help much if the infrastructure is shared with public-facing servers.

Maybe that is why the likes of BT retail are more expensive for voice services via the broadband, than others. Some CM's are charging £4.99 upto others at nearly £18/m !!

Agree with Burble on our need for reliability. The other problem for our Community Crumblies is that for decades we have enjoyed crystal clear comms via our ancient copper. Now younger relatives are going VOIP their calls sometimes sound as if they are via outer space, with breaks (maybe buffering) and poor audio quality even when using hearing aids for those who need them. I certainly regard this audio degradation as a backward step.

Either that or now realised they have to pay for DDOS protection where they've been lucky and escaped notice until recently

In reply to a post by Malwaremike:

for decades we have enjoyed crystal clear comms via our ancient copper.

You've not used my old openreach line, voice quality was always poor, certainly not "crystal clear". Those whom call into the radio stations using a traditional landline are always obvious due to the limited bandwidth.

VoIP should not be sounding as if from outer space, especially on a normal domestic internet connection.

VoIP services should sound dramatically better, possible to play good classical music, not dumbed down to Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.

Interesting. Since 2004 I occasionally contribute to local BBC radio and either attended the studio for live transmission or the interviewer came out with a recorder. They did not like the phone except in emergency. With new technology I think a change was on the way but certainly the pandemic speeded this up.

Last year I was interviewed over Skype, this being the choice of the BBC sound engineer although I told them our landline was very clear. Absolute nightmare -- there was a 1.5 second lag on the line making the flow of question/answer almost impossible. I was tempted to use R/T procedure "over" after each answer. This year's interview over our landline to same studio was perfect. Our BB is consistently 35-37MB and regular Facetime to the next room, Canada or Australia is excellent.

Not sure that many call into the radio on landline, surely most people are mobile these days and many haven't a landline at all? I have checked with a BBC contact and he says landlines are fine for voice interview, mobiles especially in vehicles can be tricky, or someone wandering around the garden on a cordless is the bane of the gardening programmes!

FaceTime is VoIP just a “walled garden” approach with tightly controlled access and high quality codecs and as we know available only to Apple devices. Although I believe that will change with the new iOS release in a few weeks...

In reply to a post by Malwaremike:

Last year I was interviewed over Skype, this being the choice of the BBC sound engineer although I told them our landline was very clear. Absolute nightmare -- there was a 1.5 second lag on the line making the flow of question/answer almost impossible.

Skype is an essentially free system which can suffer from congestion, a downside of the free nature, and the volume of users. It is a propriatory form of VoIP that can't interoperate with systems based on standards; this is because it was early.

for quality voice, your broadband download speed is usually not an issue, if your uplink is slow (under 2 Mbps) then it is advised to ask other users to stop using whilst you are on a call.

Some radio stations were using WhatsApp and Facetime Audio to call in, the broadcast output quality of these calls was dramatically clearer than any analogue telephone line.

The reason it sounds better is that old copper phone lines were designed for voice and apparently only carries 8 kHz. A VoIP connection over the internet can choose different codecs starting at 8 kHz upto 44 kHz which would be CD quality.

In reply to a post by aquiss:

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Wonder who the other SIP providers are…?

VoIP Unlimited is another we have come across.

Looks like a repeat strike by the same gang.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/10/ddos-a...

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Looks like a repeat strike by the same gang.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/10/ddos-a...

Though for clarity, it appears Voipfone were not targeted this time or have put measures into place to protect themselves further.

Old copper lines - or POTS audio range was actually 300Hz to 3.4KHz or thereabouts - the 8KHz would be the sample rate if sampled/digitised using the Nyquist rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_rate

Basically you need to sample at twice the highest audio frequency so no aliasing (distortion) occurs. Whilst a CD sample rate is 44.1KHz - the highest audio frequency that can be conveyed is 22.05KHz.

I think if I remeber back to by telecomms theory the male voice has a fundamental frequency around 100Hz and females 200Hz - yes oddly below the POTS range - however the majority of recognisable speach is contained in the harmonics hence you can still be understood - just!