XT service restored; wait starts for compo

At 7.30am, Telecom issued a statement saying XT cellsites had been restored as of 10pm last night, ending its three-day outage.

The 30-cellsites still down on Friday were concentrated around the lower South Island.

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"Intensive monitoring of the network will continue," says the statement.

Telecom also reiterated that a "full and thorough" review of XT will be carried out by an independent third-party (still to be named).

"Compensation for customers significantly affected by the network issues will be announced early next week."

The operational phrase is that sentence is "significantly affected". How Telecom defines that criteria will be crucial in quelling customer rage.

In NBR's view, every XT customer affected should get some kind of slice. After the December 14 outage, everybody got a free weekend's calling and a backdated Monday of mobile calls unbilled.

Some should get more than the December 14 peace offer; certainly, it will be necessary for Telecom to keep their business.

But there are two levels of being significantly affected.

One, you're a company that can prove it lost business.

Or, two, you're a customer in an area that had to wait not half a day (some cellsites were restored around midday Wednesday) but until late Friday night as Telecom made tough calls - in the manner of a Survivor pecking order challenge - about which areas to bring back online first (as for most of the outage, the company could only restore base stations one by one).

Telecom shares (NZX: TEL), which were at $2.44 mid-week, yesterday closed down three cents to $2.38.