Do power outages like today's harm Vector's chances of winning a Crown fibre contract (the lines company is bidding for Auckland under the government's $1.5 billion fibre-to-the-premise initiative). 

It would seem to undo all the bus ads, TV ads and web campaigning that Vector has splurged on over the past couple of weeks to bolster its Crown fibre chances against more traditional contenders such as Telecom.

NBR asked Vector for comment on this point. Spokesperson Philippa White responded: "No network in the world is immune from outages and no infrastructure company can provide a 100% guarantee.

"Our priority - always - is to ensure that we get service restored as quickly as
possible and are fully aware of the inconvenience outages cause to customers. In today's outage power was back on in just over an hour and crews were on site checking each segment of the faulted cable."