XT outage was beyond Third World - Tuanz
As Telecom starts to assess exactly why 100,000 XT customers lost service for most of yesterday, one industry commentator has harsh words.
UPDATE: Telecom announces XT compo - but business customers left waiting
Speaking to NBR last night from an OECD telecommunications meeting in Paris, Telecommunications Users Association (Tuanz) chief executive Ernie Newman said, “From here, it looks bizarre.
“Even third world countries don't experience outages of that magnitude and length.
Late yesterday, the chief executive of Telecom’s retail division, Alan Gourdie, told media:
“We do not expect our customers to pay for services they have not received [many, on prepay plans, literally couldn’t, regardless], so we will advise, as soon as we’re able, how we will manage this.”
For Mr Newman, whose organisation represents the interests of around 500 corporate customers, a day’s credit is unlikely to cut it.
“Corporate customers will be asking Telecom some extremely penetrating questions. The economic cost will have been substantial and they will have to offer compensation,” the Tuanz boss said last night.
During the crisis, Chris Quin - chief executive of Telecom’s Gen-i division - sent his corporate customers a string of email updates. Now comes the harder big: keeping them happy. XT has been instrumental in helping Gen-i win wider IT contracts with a string of big companies.
Signup to free NBR email alerts here
Back to home
Back to top
Print
Email
Share
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Google
Yahoo
Technorati
Scoopit
NBR SERVICES
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Sign up for NBR subscriber content or email alerts
Latest
Comments and questions6
Some people have no idea, this was a huge fault, $!#! happens... Telecom have one of the words most advanced cellphone networks, and to put it in the third world is just silly!
Telecom is third world. When complaining about the on off service in Queenstown I was told in all seriousness that I could not expect quality service in an Alpine location. ( downtown Queenstown ) .
Also when the incompetent previous CEO Theresa Gatting allowed without a fight for the extreme left NZ Labour Government at the time to steal their shareholders property rights without compensation when they agreed to unbundle their services. Such behaviour has not gone unnoticed around the world. Investors beware
Say again Steve?We have no idea?Most advanced?Yeah right.Did teleCON already gave you your bonus?They use paper cable for land lines in which get grounded if get wet,old voice and data facilities in the exchanges. Well if we are still in the cold war or vietnam war its up to date.They just need a musem curator on their exchanges. I 've been on a third world,and compare to teleCON. 4th world probably. The TRUTH!
I really think you have no idea, the cabnetisation that is going on right now; is way more advanced then even what the USA has. Yeah sure in certain parts they have FTTH but per capita we are a LOT better! Some countries are only just getting 3g. Telecoms 3g Network is better in so many ways that what other countries have.
This fault happened not because the network is 3rd world.
It happened because there was no back-up with built in redundancy
Blame the accountants for not allowing the engineers to built a robust network.All that was required was that it be cheap and return a profit as soon as possible.Short term planning hobbled by cost.
Reliability costs more and redundancy doesn't pay for itself.
You get what you pay for.This may cost Telecom more in the long term
In USA and other parts of the world they have more money. So it be fixed faster. And parts will be more easy to get too. Telecom may had to ship parts over and it takes time and telecom may be using old config and old parts for a temp to they get the new ones
Post new comment or question
To share this article, click on a service below