A $75,000 "goodwill gesture" from Telecom will go towards
native plantings at Harbour Cone, Middlemarch and Warrington,
in Dunedin, after the company sought to make amends for the
failures of its XT system.
But the company's problems do not appear to be over, as
thousands of users north of Taupo experienced problems
yesterday with calling, text and data services, following yet
another outage.
The Dunedin funding was part of $250,000 the company last
month promised to South Island community projects in the wake
of network problems earlier this year.
The Dunedin City Council will vote to confirm the details of
how it will be spent next week.
A report to a Dunedin City Council community development
committee meeting next Tuesday said Telecom had originally
suggested the total amount be allocated to Harbour Cone and
neighbouring rural communities.
But following discussion with community and recreation
services staff, it was decided Harbour Cone, bought by the
council in early 2008 for $2.6 million, would get $35,000,
while $15,000 would go towards plantings in Warrington, and
$10,000 worth to Middlemarch.
Other planting projects that were part of the council's Let's
Grow Native International Year of Diversity programme would
get $15,000, to go to projects in areas including Tomahawk,
Te Rauone, Long Beach, Waikouaiti and Ocean View.
Community and recreation services would liaise with community
boards over specific details of the plantings.
Dunedin Mayor Peter Chin said the goodwill gesture was
"tremendous", and would pay for initiatives that were
planned, but for which funding had not been identified.
"It's helped plantings to happen sooner than they might
otherwise have."
The XT network outage yesterday, affecting the top of the
North Island, began at 9am, and the service was back to full
operation by 1pm.
Telecom spokeswoman Katherine Murphy said the trouble seemed
to have originated at individual cell sites linked to one of
the Auckland-based radio network controllers.
- david.loughrey@odt.co.nz
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