Telecom can't find XT fault

The lack of mobile phone coverage from Telecom's XT network continued to frustrate thousands of people yesterday as services remained interrupted in Queenstown, Invercargill, Timaru and parts of Dunedin.

Late yesterday, there was no relief in sight as Telecom had still not identified the cause and put in place a restoration plan.

Telecom spokesman Paul Deavoll said from Christchurch the best people from around the world had been involved in trying to identify the problem, which continued to affect XT users from Timaru south.

Affected users could not make or receive phone calls or send and receive text messages.

Mobile broadband services were also out of action.

"We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience. We have been getting in front of our customers and being upfront about the issue and apologising. The reliability of our network is far from what we expected."

Telecom was working actively with clients to find technological alternatives, he said.

The older CDMA network was unaffected by the latest XT problems, Mr Deavoll said.

The disruption started on Wednesday for XT users south of Taupo, but while the northern part of that region had its services restored by 11am yesterday, the southern part continued to be affected.

Arrowtown Plumbing owner Mark Galbraith said the outage was "very, very frustrating".

"I can't get hold of any of my staff. Fortunately, I'm still on the old network, so they can get hold of me from landlines, but if I was on the new network we'd be in even bigger trouble," he said.

Not being able to communicate with his staff who were out on jobs was causing a great deal of frustration.

"It's costing me money and hours of extra work. How to calculate that is very difficult, but I would be expecting something to compensate me and my business.

"It's the second time in three weeks and it's not good enough," Mr Galbraith said.

Harcourts real estate agent Kirsty Sinclair said the company was badly affected by the failure of the XT network.

"It's extremely frustrating. We can't communicate with each other or our clients. It's not satisfactory at all," she said.

Otago Chamber of Commerce chief executive John Christie said there had been a huge impact on businesses which relied on technology to run their enterprises.

"It is past being inconvenient. It has become much more than unreasonable. People don't mind a small outage, but this is considerably more than that."

One of the frustrations was the fact Telecom was unable to give a defined time-frame for the problem to be fixed, he said.

Businesses had been tolerant, but Mr Christie had noted a change in attitude yesterday, particularly as the outage came so soon after the previous one, which knocked out XT mobile coverage for about eight hours.

He would not be surprised if some businesses started taking a close look at their contracts to see if they could change providers.

"It is unfortunate for Telecom. They promoted this technology as leading-edge and being efficient and effective. They have failed to deliver and this isn't the first time. Users feel let down."

It was pleasing to hear Telecom chief executive Paul Reynolds had ordered an independent review of the problem, Mr Christie said.

Compensation for loss of business was a complicated area, with some businesses more reliant than others on technology to run their operations.

It would come down to the goodwill of Telecom and the ability of businesses to prove their losses, he said.

Telecom's network outage coincides with New Zealand's biggest golfing event, the Michael Hill New Zealand Golf Open, which began yesterday in Arrowtown.

Tournament director Ben Tuohy said organisers "were making do".

"We've had to issue a lot more radios to our suppliers so we can contact them around the course," he said.

Late last night, a Telecom spokesman said the situation was still unresolved.