Alcatel-Lucent global boss takes rap for XT
Alcatel-Lucent global chief executive Ben Verwaayen has copped the rap for the repeated, and as yet unexplained, failures on Telecom’s XT network.
"It is not acceptable and I take responsibility," said Mr Verwaayen this morning, speaking to Radio New Zealand National from New York.
Yesterday, Telecom chief executive Paul Reynolds said he had personally called Mr Verwaayen to “put Alcatel-Lucent on notice.”
And, it seems, Mr Reynolds may have also requested a mea culpa media appearance.
It's a role Mr Verwaayan clearly does not relish; during his interview he often sounded repetitive and awkward.
"I apologise to the customers of the network. They have the right to expect a flawless service - that is what they are paying for. We have let Telecom down on that and we are going to make sure we rectify it.”
Rivals form a queue
Although Dr Reynolds was short on specifics as to what this involved, he said all of the French company’s competitors had been calling Telecom and “we will talk to them.” The chief executive also emphasised Telecom’s long-standing relationship with Alcatel, however.
Alcatel-Lucent, designed and built XT, and is responsible for its operation, Dr Reynolds said yesterday - although he added that following the recent outages, Telecom staff will now take a stronger hands-on role in the day-to-day running of the network.
Telecom's XT communiqués have been noteable for making more and more references to Alcatel-Lucent as the outages have worn on.
Dr Reynolds noted that Alcatel-Lucent mobile networks for other carriers around the planet do work.
Mr Verwaayen picked up this point with, "In the case of Telecom we have to take responsibility. This is proven technology, this is stuff that is running around the world very satisfactorily and if there are things happening in New Zealand, of course we take responsibility."
Alcatel-Lucent New Zealand country manager Steve Lowe resigned on Friday, soon followed by Telecom CTO Frank Mount, whom Dr Reynolds described as closely involved with the design of the network.
It never rains ...
The French company, which was formed by the 2006 merger of Alcatel with US company Lucent Technologies (an AT&T spin-off), has also recently been in the news over bribery allegations.
On February 19, Alcatel-Lucent paid $US125 million to settle the charges, brought by the US Dept of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Comments and questions6
Lets not forget that the Telecom CDMA Network was put in by Lucent before the merger with Alcatel and that has been far more robust and reliable than the Vodafone Network with better coverage as well CDMA is like BETA and VHS, Beta was better technically but lost the war to VHS and so it was with CDMA versus GSM. The problem must be in how part of the new Network is designed as the Northern part with the heaviest density has been performing to expectations but Taupo South with its lighter load has been crap.
pure bull, it has never even come close to vodafones service, you compare telecoms failures to a model from the early 80's which was all based on value for price. The beta vhs battle had nothing to do with poor service, comparing apples to oranges only makes you look like a telecom employee paid to deliver positive spins ie a corporate turd polisher. Your analogies are weak, please don't stand up for a global corporations failures with stupid comparisons.
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/pietervankampen ps peter its easy to see why you'd stand up for this, weak spin.
You are a world class idiot with the BS yo have posted
I keep hearing these Beta v VHS comparisons and while those are somewhat true, it's also true that CDMA on the whole only ever caught on in Korea and North America.
In North America at the time, the common GSM/UTMS frequencies were being used by emergency services and the military prompting the differentiation with Europe that still lingers a little in the US, even after the emergency services transitioned to other frequencies. NZ had no such issues to contend with.
If Telecom had gone for the common and widely supported EU standard (GSM) that would have been way smarter, after all the Betamax lesson had been learned by everybody in the early 80's, 20yrs prior to 027.
Its probably worth remembering that CDMA was deployed in Australia at time Telecom deployed its, so its choice was reasonable at the time and its fair to say it was half a generation more advanced than GSM. Also at the time it was far from clear which WDCMA technoloy would win the battle for 3G. The fact that Telstra pulled the plug on its CDMA network probably had most to do with employing a CEO who originally came from Europe -leaving Telecom little choice.