At its quarterly results briefing this morning, Telecom said it had signed three "reasonable size" corporate clients since the January 27 to 29 XT network failure.All are wins from Vodafone, said chief executive Paul Reynolds. One is Toyota - ir
At its quarterly results briefing this morning, Telecom said it had signed three "reasonable size" corporate clients since the January 27 to 29 XT network failure.
All are wins from Vodafone, said chief executive Paul Reynolds. One is Toyota - ironically, another company immediately familiar with service issues.
The company had been with Vodafone for around 10 years.
The deal covers Toyota''s corporate office but not franchises.
Gen-i chief executive Chris Quin told NBR that his Telecom division got a foot in the door after Toyota decided to consolidate its fixed line, data and mobile services and put out a tender late last year. Clear communication and a clear action plan helped helped reassure during the XT blackout, said Mr Quin.
Nevertheless, Telecom did push its full-year profit guidance toward the bottom of its range today, blaming, in part, the XT outage.
“Some customers will choose not to come to XT who would have,” said Dr Reynolds. However, the chief executive said retail foot traffic had quickly been restored to pre-outage levels.
Trying to keep Fonterra in the fold
And while three big customers have come onboard, another major win from Vodafone - Fonterra - has halted its transition to XT. Gen-i boss Chris Quin said he expected that the giant diary cooperative would continue its upgrade after the two sides had assessed the situation.
Dr Reynolds said Telecom had doubled the processing power of XT’s two radio network controllers since the outage, and that two additional RNCs would be installed in March.
The chief executive told NBR that both upgrades were always scheduled, and accommodated within Telecom’s existing capex.
SLAs may kick in
Asked whether Telecom’s networking partner, Alcatel Lucent, will pick up the $5 million customer compo tab or the price of the new RNCs (which cost up to $US12 million each, according to an Alcatel Lucent competitor), Dr Reynolds only said that his company was taking full responsibility.
He added that, after the pending review, “If SLAs (service-level agreements) show something up we’ll be all over that in the usual commercial way”.
What happened on January 27
Dr Reynolds said the failure of “an ancillary piece of hardware” caused the initial outage on January 27.
A “swarm” of thousands of customers trying to reregister at once then overwhelmed Telecom’s Christchurch RNC, which controls XT traffic from Taupo south. The RNC had to be re-started, leading to service degradation for up to 200,000 customers, and a three-day outage for some in the south of the South Island.
Another week - again
Telecom is still at the short-list stage for signing a company to carry out its promised independent review of XT. The party carrying out the review should be named next week, said Dr Reynolds.
