Vodafone struggles with the S word
Now, granted, Vodafone’s spin doctors don’t have quite the practice of Telecom’s at dealing with network outages.
But when intermittent problems hit 16 Vodafone cellsites around the Bay of Plenty on Saturday, it was still a bit quick to point the finger.
A spokesman immediately blamed a routine-upgrade-gone-wrong by fibre contractor FX Networks.
Ouch. With FX Networks mooted as one of the companies that could help connect regional fibre companies under the government’s UFB scheme now is not the time for bad publicity.
FX Networks MD Murray Jurgeleit - used to more positive publicity, such as Commerce Commissioner Anita Mazzoleni salivating over his company's fibre investment at Telcon10 - was quick to deny the accusation.
Monday afternoon, Vodafone came around to Mr Jurgeleit’s world view.
Mostly.
"On Saturday, one of Vodafone’s fibre network providers FX Networks began a planned network upgrade to cabling between Taupiri and Horotiu,” said the company in a statement.
"The work was not expected to impact service to Vodafone customers. However a fault was triggered during the work and the automated network fail over did not take place as expected. The resulting disruption to service was clearly Vodafone’s responsibility and we acknowledge that FX networks was not at fault.”
The whole episode may provide minor comfort to Telecom boss Paul Reynolds, who has claimed that Vodafone’s 2G network can’t really act as a fallback for its 3G network, as the older service will get swamped during any outage.
Vodafone said Bay of Plenty customers could still make calls, if they kept trying.
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Comments and questions13
between a full multi-day outage affected 4/5 of your customers and something that causes the customers no problems at all because there are two networks so coverage was fine.
and yes, I do work for vodafone.
no its fxs fault, vodafone is the best
Degraded mobile coverage from 3G to 2G in an isolated area is hardly front page news but the Herald & NBR like to sensationalise these things and then have another poke at Telecom. It's like having front page news that the Herald website was inaccessable for 30mins. Running a telco is fairly complex and there will be outages.
Not withstanding the fact that XT had significant issues its good to see
1. Evidence that no network is immune to outage events and that claims which imply the opposite are bad for consumers.
2. The media are prepared to take a balanced approach to reporting on these types of events.
Are you sure there were no problems for consumers ...once again i think consumers might have a different view to the Vodafone corporate party line....even your press comments admit that service to users was interrupted ....
Despite the fact that it looks good on paper looks like the fabled 2 networks did not actually work in the real world....again.
@guy who works for Vodafone.
Am i reading your post correctly , are you saying that the press release from your own PR person which clearly states that there was a service interruption to users is incorrect? (2g network failover >insert tui billboard<
The press release says there was some loss of 2G and some loss of 3G and they didn't overlap.
Customers were always able to make calls/send TXT messages. They may have had to hit redial or send again, but that's it. Not a full-blown outage at all.
how did the XT fault become multi-day for 4/5 of the customers when it was only to 1/2 the customers for 10hrs and less than that for 3 days?
I think the XT outage became a "multi-day for 4/5 of the customers" because a Vodafone employee who contradicted his own companies press release said so. So it must be true.
became multi day when it happened on more than one day.
and probably the 4/5 comes from Telecom's release saying 215,000 out of 250,000 customers were affected.
And I think you'll find the 10 hours is rubbish because if it were true St Reynolds of the Mount wouldn't have offered $15m in compensation.
But hey, I'm sure your bonus is safe because you wouldn't be one of those charmers wearing the "I built the XT Network" skivvies I've seen, would you?
Didn't think so.
I think all you anonymouse posters will find that the $15m in compensation was more for recognition of the significant impact to the customers and that it was not for a fault of 10hr - No telco in the world can afford to hand out free credits to customers for EVERY little outage.
I have owned both Vodafone and Telecom contracted mobiles in the past 8 years and both networks if you read the terms you agree to have mention that there are sometimes things outside the control of the mobile provider. - You will find this will go for all the other services which people often take for a given for example your electricity provider cannot gurantee 100% uptime but will do all they can to get any faults resolved as quickly as they can.
Voda did not take the 1st apologised to their customers becoz of the outage... just ask them to keep trying until they can make calls...
then blame on FX...
what a good behaviour you can see, huh?
...of XT customers, and for that matter Vodafone customers as the rest of us couldn't contact anyone on XT from Taupo south...just because the rest of XT's customers had service (and 2Degrees + Vodafone for that matter) it doesn't mean the rest of us were affected. I have friends on XT in the South Island....I like to call them, I couldn't...I was affected.
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