Aardvark Daily

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Telecom's XT network was launched with a huge amount of fanfare, hype and publicity.

This, we were told, was a giant leap in performance for mobile phone technology.

They even brought the little fella from Top Gear out here to promote XT with his freshly whitened teeth.

But I did try to warn you (YouTube vid).

And now, for the second time in as many months, huge chunks of this 21st-century mobile phone network have fallen flat on their face, instantly converting customers' cellphones into little more than very expensive MP3 players.

Did I hear a raucous "High Five" echoing from the halls of Vodafone's corporate offices yesterday?

Telecom claims the fault was caused by a piece of faulty network equipment, and that sounds fair enough.

Let's face it, from time to time stuff breaks and when it breaks, things stop working.

However, the difference between a bad network and a good network is how such failures are handled.

Clearly Telecom have done XT "on the cheap" and there just isn't the redundancy or backup facilities in place to survive the failure of a single piece of hardware or software.

That's bad -- but not unexpected, at least in the case of Telecom.

Over decades we've seen that Telecom is keen on posting huge profits rather than engaging in sensible network design and a good level of preventative maintenance.

Perhaps these are very good reasons why Telecom ought to be kept a good arm's length away from any national broadband network when it's commissioned.

Let's not forget that it's not just the XT network that has suffered embarrassing outages of late -- their DSL network is not really much better. I seem to recall far too many instances in the past year when I (and many thousands of other Telecom customers) have been forced to sit around twiddling our thumbs while we should have been working away online.

Now we come to the tricky issue of compensation.

As Ernie Newman put it -- simply giving affected customers a day of free calling on a weekend just doesn't cut it for the thousands of business customers who've lost real money as a result of the XT outage.

Such compensation doesn't really cost Telecom a bean. What's needed is some kind of commitment from the company to improve service levels and guarantee that we won't see a recurrence of this massive failure.

If Telecom is serious about showing a commitment to service then how about they promise a month's free connection (complete with the normal free-minutes) or a $50 pre-pay credit to all affected customers each time there's an outage that lasts more than an hour?

I bet that'd get a few thumbs out of backsides within Telecom's network planning and maintenance departments.

Unfortunately, with only two national-coverage networks in NZ, there's no way we're actually going to see a dramatic improvement in the levels of service on offer.

For all its faults, Telecom's XT mobile package really isn't that much worse than Vodafone.

I'm still with the Vodafone network and, despite being in plain sight of their celltower all day (about 3kms away) I still find I get SMS messages telling me that I've just missed a call, even though my phone never rang (what a great way to double-dip by charging the caller xx cents a minute and me xx cents a minute to check my voicemail).

As I've mentioned before, I really, really wish someone would bring out a P2P mobile messaging network that hooked into a WiFi backbone for wider-area delivery. They'd create a new market and make a killing!

So, were *you* affected by yesterday's outage?

Have you had a guts-full or do you just consider such outages to be a "fact of life"?

Are you considering changing to Vodafone or are you aware that this might just be an "out of the frying pan into the fire" move?

Are you one of the majority of Kiwis who carry two phones as a way of reducing costs and covering your arse in the case of network failures?

What would you consider a fair and reasonable level of compensation for those who lost their mobile service (again) yesterday?

Given Telecom's apparent inability to manage a piss-up in a brewery, should they be considered as a major partner in the creation of a national broadband network?

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