TNZ clings to business after outage
Telecom NZ (TNZ) has tried to reassure shareholders and analysts that companies are still keen on its XT network after one of New Zealand's largest companies, Fonterra, postponed moving its employees onto it because of recent widespread outages.
Fonterra's postponement in migrating 3000 of its staff onto the network was outed yesterday in the New Zealand media.
"Some corporates are waiting for an explanation. That's what is to be expected. It feels like it will be a short-term impact," Telecom NZ CEO Paul Reynolds told ZDNet.com.au. Reynolds said he did not know of any other major corporate customers putting migrations on hold.
"We have sat down with all the customers in transition to XT," said Chris Quin, CEO of Telecom's IT-services arm, Gen-i.
"Three corporate customers, including Toyota, have signed new XT contracts since the outage. We are working closely with the relationships. We are confident [we will keep them]," Quin added.
Reynolds said Fonterra had told him it would continue the migration as soon as it knew what had gone wrong. However, he had no time frame of when the migration will continue.
Telecom has been auditing what happened to cause the outage and announced an independent review using international consultants. The company chosen to do the review will be announced next week, with the report due in six weeks, Reynolds added.
Telecom has blamed the service outage on a fault in a piece of ancillary routing hardware which caused sites mainly in the lower South Island to lose service.
To increase network resilience, the company has since installed two extra Radio Network Controller sites, adding to the existing two sites, something it claims it would do anyway, as the network grew.
"The outage impacted 5 per cent of XT customers severely, which make up 2 per cent of our mobile customers. It caused a reduction for a few days in people coming into our stores," he told ZDNet.com.au.
Earlier, Reynolds said an initial impact on the company would be the $5 million "goodwill package" for customers, but beyond that, the company did not know.
"Clearly some customers will choose other networks. How significant? We do not know," he said.
Telecom NZ announced a profit of NZ$80 million (AU$63.4 million) in the December quarter, down 23.8 per cent on the same period last year
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