The voice of the Speaking Clock in the UK for over 20 years, Brian Cobby, has died aged 83.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/nov/05/brian-cobby
D-Day for D-Digits
Ofcom, the UK telecommunications regulator, announced last Thursday that for the 01202 (Bournemouth/Poole/Christchurch area) dialling code, callers from landlines will have to dial the full national number including the 01202 code, because Ofcom want to make local numbers available beginning with the D-digits 0 and 1 – for example, 01202 012345 and 01202 123456. (These numbers can’t be dialled without the 01202 first, since 0 and 1 have other meanings as the first digit). Although these numbers have been available for a long time as ‘National Dialling Only’ numbers, suitable for use as ‘hidden’ numbers possibly as the destination of a redirect, they haven’t been issued to your average member of the public in the UK before. It looks like this is all about to change, and means that an extra 200 DEF blocks (1,000 numbers) will be freed up to allocate to Communications Providers in the 01202 area, giving them a few more years before they run out of numbers.
30 Years of Channel 4 and S4C
Today marks the 30th birthday of S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru), the fourth channel in Wales, which started broadcasting on 1 November 1982. The following day in the rest of the UK, Channel 4 started broadcasting to the nation along with its first programme, Countdown, first broadcast on 2 November 1982 at 16:45, orignally presented by the late Richard Whiteley, and of course the programme still broadcasting to this day 30 years later. I don’t think they expected it to last that long…!
Happy birthday to both channels.
RIP Analogue Television in the UK – 2 November 1936 to 23 October 2012
Today marks the closing of a nearly 76-year chapter in the history of television – the final three transmitters and their relays are being switched over to digital television tonight in Northern Ireland. The first production ‘high definition’ (that is 405 lines) black-and-white television service was introduced by the BBC on 2 November 1936, and although the number of lines has changed and a chrominance signal added to provide colour television, a lot of the technology used in analogue television is very similar today as it was then. Along with it goes several other related technologies which only existed on analogue TV, the first of which is NICAM 728 Digital Stereo (which stands for Near-Instantaneous Companded Audio Multiplex, and 728kbit/s was the bitrate) which introduced stereo sound on UK television for the first time in the 1986. The second is PDC (Programme Delivery Control) which was a way of instructing video recorders when to start or stop for a given programme, and was broadcast as teletext packets, so when CEEFAX gets switched off tonight, so does PDC. (Freeview does have digital equivalents of both of these of course).
It’s nice to see that BBC1 Northern Ireland and Ulster Television (UTV) are jointly producing a commemorative programme tonight to mark the occasion, something which none of the other English nations and regions did to my knowledge. It’s being shown on BBC1 Northern Ireland tonight at 2235, finishing at 2330, at which point the analogue signal will be switched off, taking with it over 75 years of history and good old CEEFAX.
So, as Phillip Schofield used to say a lot in the Broom Cupboard when BBC1 NI wished to opt out of the end of Children’s BBC – “Goodbye Northern Ireland” – for analogue television tonight in NI, it really is goodbye.
Don’t forget to switch off your television set.
RIP Pages from Ceefax
This Wednesday sees the end of analogue television in the British Isles, both in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland when all the remaining transmitters in both NI and Ireland are switched to digital. One of the casualties of this is the Ceefax service, which began on 23 September 1974. And although some European countries still broadcast World System Teletext services on their DVB-T transmissions, the UK and Ireland do not, choosing to use the MHEG-5 based digital text services instead. Although the Ceefax service will be continuing to work up until pretty much the end of analogue transmissions at around midnight on Tuesday 23 October, another British institution is ceasing its broadcasts tonight, and that is ‘Pages from Ceefax’, which was basically a rolling broadcast of what was orignally P198 or 298 depending on channel, but is now I think P152. This page is a special magazine page consisting of various pages from the main teletext service, and can actually be viewed on a real teletext set as well as it being “in vision”.
The BBC has been broadcasting Pages from Ceefax ever since I can remember, presumably because the BBC thought that it was a good way of showcasing the teletext service to viewers who did not have a teletext set. Various teletext decoders were used along the way, from the original ones which used a Texas Instruments TIFAX (74S262) character generator (which were easy to spot because of the curious designs of the 6 and 9 characters), all the way up to the Mullard/Philips SAA5050 chips, with the ‘BBC Mode 7’ character designs in the 80s and the new SAA5243 character set with thicker horizontal lines on the numbers introduced at roughly the same time as Fastext sets were coming on the market. These days, it’s very hard to find an analogue TV in existence which doesn’t have some kind of World System Teletext decoder in it, but when PfC was first introduced, not many people had them and they were expensive.
Although most of England, Wales and Scotland lost their Ceefax service some time ago, Northern Ireland still has it on analogue BBC2 until the end of Tuesday 23 October, and so the early hours of Monday 22 October sees the last broadcast of PfC, which is on BBC2 between 04.45 and 06.00. (For some reason, there is no PfC on Tuesday 23 October which probably should have been the last one.) The end of an era, and I somehow don’t think ‘Pages from the BBC Red Button’ is going to replace it, since there’s no need – or at least I can’t think of any DVB-T TVs or set-top boxes which don’t have the feature built in.
Goodbye Pages from Ceefax, and all that (some might say “cheesy”) library music that was played alongside it.
The end of analogue television in England
As I write this, we are just minutes away from the official switch-off of analogue television in England, with the three main transmitters in the Tyne Tees region, Pontop Pike, Bilsdale and Chatton due to be switched to digital starting at midnight tonight. Wales and Scotland have already been fully switched, and the only transmitters left are those of Northern Ireland, who will switch at midnight on October 24, along with the transmitters in the Republic of Ireland who switch over at the same time.
It’s odd to think we’ve been waiting a long time for this moment to come, and it’s finally here, with Ceefax just under a month to live until it’s finally switched off for good. Goodnight, and don’t forget to switch off your television set.
The Wednesday IPv4 Report
Today’s news is that yesterday ARIN went below 3 /8s left. As their announcement shows, this means the RIR has now moved from Phase 1 to Phase 2, which has slightly different rules on allocation. Block requests for /16 or larger are now going to be processed in strict order, and LIRs will have 60 days to pay up and not 90 (for IPv4 blocks only). Also unused blocks are going to be put back into the pool earlier, after three months and not six.
Interesting news, and the squeeze is on. Let’s see how it pans out…
The Tuesday IPv4 Report
You can always trust The Register to go for a sensationalist headline, so here goes… The article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/dwp_ipv4_addresses_unused/ gives us the headline that the UK Department of Work and Pensions are supposedly sitting on a gold mine after someone apparently discovered that DWP has a /8 block of IPv4 which it is not advertising to the Internet (This story is orignally based on this blog post) . Outrage followed, and the comments sections of several web sites were bunged up with demands for .gov.uk to return the block immediately to RIPE sell it for £millions and renumber it to 10.0.0.0/8 addresses.
There’s a few problems with this. First, this is the British Government we’re talking about. Even if they could sell the block, it would probably cost them more to renumber it than the profit they’d supposedly make from doing so. Secondly, they’re entitled to have this block of addresses (which predate the ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/AfriNIC/LACNIC system – they were allocated by IANA as an “early registration”) and they are also entited not to advertise them, if they so choose. There’s nothing that I know of in the rules that states they must advertise them. Thirdly, I don’t even think they can sell the block under RIPE NCC rules anyway, and even if they did return the block, it wouldn’t actually help because I believe RIPE have stated that any returned blocks would be allocated under the “final /8” rules anyway. Fourthly, as someone amusingly pointed out in this mailing list posting, no-one’s complained at all about 25.0.0.0/8 which is another .gov.uk block, allocated to the Ministry of Defence. And of course, finally, finding another /8 down the back of the sofa as it were would only delay IPv4 exhaustion by another month or so anyway.
And then just when you thought it had all blown over, we then see a tweet from the Cambridge MP Julian Huppert informing us that he’s tabled a question (which, who knows, might get asked at the next Prime Minister’s Question Time) about what is going on with 51.0.0.0/8. Probably the first time IPv4 has ever been mentioned in Parliament. And in the same tweet, he helpfully provides a link to an ePetition calling for the Government to sell the block! I won’t be signing that!
Whatever next? I need a lie down …
This week in the IPv4 world
And what a week it’s been! As I posted yesterday, RIPE ran out of IPv4 addresses above the final /8 (for which special rules apply), effectively exhausting the supply in Europe. I was predicting Tuesday of next week, personally, so all said and done, a nice way to end the week.
RIPE tweeted a link to the photo of the moment that the button was pressed – you can find the tweet here and the actual photo here
Even the Huston-o-Meter has been updated out-of-sequence yesterday, so he now accurately records the actual exhaustion date. Still not sure why as of today his figure stands at 1.04 or so though, or even why the RIPE graph is still claiming 17.30 million addresses (1.0.3 /8s) – what’s the extra 0.03 /8s for?
So, the bit you’re all asking, who got the final blocks? Well, a whopping 109 allocations were made yesterday. Sifting through the data, the largest block allocated was to H3G S.p.A. of Italy which was a /14. There was a /15 allocated to EWE TEL GmbH of Germany, and /16s allocated to Jump Internet Services SRL of Romania and Swisscom (Schweiz) AG of Switzerland. /17s were allocated to Inspiring Networks B.V. i.o. of the Netherlands and Jump Internet Services SRL of Romania. /18s went to YANDEX LLC of Russia, MSP Format Ltd of Ukraine, Host Europe GmbH of Germany, and Jump Internet Services SRL of Romania.
I won’t list everything else under that as it would take ages, but it seems that poor old Jump at least were given split blocks. There were also 43 separate allocations, some as small as /29, to LIRs in Cyprus.
And so that’s it, that’s the end! All I wish now is that all the ISPs in the UK (and probably plenty of other countries too) that haven’t moved to offering IPv6 to end users already (and that’s most of them) would actually take their head out the sand and do something about it! (Believe it or not, even Virgin Media has a /24 of IPv6 allocated which they’re not currently allocating any of to their retail customers yet…)
And don’t forget the obligatory singing of the now-famous song of course. Now, where’s my deckchair and popcorn … ?
IPv4 all gone
RIPE NCC have just posted the following news to their mailing list:
http://lists.ripe.net/pipermail/ncc-announce/2012-September/000615.html
This means that there are no more IPv4 addresses left available for allocation in the RIPE region, except for the last /8, which is covered by the special rules – which are basically “no, you can’t have any more” :)