New Zealand’s largest freight forwarder has moved its telecommunications business from Telecom to Vodafone.

Mondiale Freight Services did not want to comment on its previous contract, but NBR understands that the string of four XT outages contributed to the company’s decision (at the time it signed with Vodafone, Mondiale was on Telecom CDMA).

Telecom previously held most of Mondiale’s business, but Vodafone had a foot in the door with several of the freight forwarder’s staff using iPhones on its network.

Mondiale has 250 staff spread over offices nationwide, with 300 landlines and 100 mobile connections.

Vodafone said the deal also involved vehicle tracking and smartphones used to access the internet.

Group IT Manager Richard Gray said a big appeal was Vodafone’s talkZoneZero plan, which allows staff to call each other for unlimited minutes at a fixed fee.

Telecom has said that Toyota plus four or five un-named "mid-size corporates" have signed since its second major XT outage late January.

The biggest XT-related casualty so far has been the mobile communications component of Gen-i's contract with Fonterra.

Under the September deal, 3500 Fonterra mobile accounts, including 600 to 700 data cards, were to be moved to Telecom’s XT network. The contract was for three years.

2000 of the connections were former Vodafone accounts and "net new" to Gen-i, NBR was told; the remaining 1500 were upgrading from Telecom's old CDMA network.

Now, after just 35% of users being migrated to XT, the transition has been put on hold.

Gen-i chief executive Chris Quin said he is confident the hold is temporary.