Telecom and its troubled XT network has been put on notice by
the Otago and Southland district health boards.
Regional chief information officer Grant Taylor said he
wanted an assurance from Telecom it could provide a
consistent service, without "disruption", until September.
The boards would give the beleaguered telecommunications
giant several weeks to provide the service guarantee.
"If [Telecom] cannot [provide a guarantee] I will give a
recommendation to the board that we look for a new provider
and discontinue our contract."
The boards joined the XT network as soon as it became
available in May last year, and 400 of its 2000 mobile users
were on the network. Some staff had switched back to the
older CDMA network in recent weeks, but Mr Taylor could not
say how many.
XT's performance had not impressed.
As well as the well-publicised four outages, the network
seemed slow in Otago, and easily overloaded.
No safety issues had arisen from the network's poor
performance, however.
"However, the issue isn't around what has happened, but the
potential it creates.
"There are numerous safety issues to consider, particularly
for our community-based staff, such as mental health workers
and district nurses."
Communicating with Telecom over the problems could have been
better, too.
"They have been talking with us and have provided us with
CDMA phones. However, that communication has been reactive
rather than proactive - they only get in touch once a problem
has occurred."
Telecom Gen-i chief executive Chris Quin expected he would be
able to give an assurance within weeks that XT was as "robust
and reliable" as any other mobile network.
However, the notion of giving an assurance of no service
disruptions was "naive" and was not industry practice.
It would be unrealistic to expect a mobile network to never
experience a fault, which might be caused by an "act of God",
and he did not believe there would be a way to measure it.
He disagreed there was a particular issue with service in
Otago.
However, Mr Quin said the company acknowledged "wider
performance issues" with the network, independent of its
outages. These were being dealt with.
He also disagreed that Telecom had not been on the front foot
in its dealings with the boards.
It was proactive in offering the boards CDMA phones for key
staff members, and also in offering to halt the rollout of XT
to the rest of the boards' phones.
He believed only a few key staff at Otago and Southland DHBs
had opted to go back to the CDMA network.
The company was working "day and night" to sort out the
network's woes.
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