Telecom Christmas Gift to Customers after Broadband Outage

14 December 2012

Telecom Apology and Christmas Gift to Customers after Broadband Outage

Free landline to landline national calls for Telecom customers nationwide on Christmas Day, and free WiFi hotspots at popular holiday destinations over holidays.

Telecom announced today that landline to landline calls across New Zealand will be free on Christmas Day for all its fixed-line customers, as a goodwill gesture following broadband outages this week.

This is in addition to Telecom customers being able to connect their smartphone, tablet, laptop or any other mobile device to more than 120 free WiFi hotspots Telecom is installing at dozens of popular holiday destinations around New Zealand. Further details, including hotspot locations, will be confirmed next week.

Telecom CEO Retail Chris Quin said: “We want to do something for our customers throughout New Zealand that shows we understand how frustrating this week’s outages through the night and late evening were for them.

“This is our way of saying ‘we’re sorry, we know how important it is to you to stay connected, and we want to make it that much easier for you to connect with family and friends this Christmas’.”

Mr Quin said that Telecom’s broadband network had been working normally since Wednesday morning, following outages that affected up to two-thirds of Telecom’s broadband customer base. The company had undertaken a thorough technical review of what went wrong and was confident the same problems would not reoccur.

“These outages reinforced just how critical a consistent broadband service is for our customers. We are totally committed to regaining their full confidence.

“Telecom has invested significantly over recent years in our core network to ensure its capacity and quality. So as you can imagine we are extremely disappointed – as we know our customers are – with the recent problems and we are determined to prevent them happening again,” Mr Quin added.

“The reality is that internet service was down or materially degraded for a total of about 19 hours spread over two days – with two-thirds of this downtime in the early hours between midnight and 6am.

“We decided free calling at Christmas allowed us to say ‘we’re sorry’ in a way that is meaningful for our home broadband customers, all of whom have a Telecom fixed line phone service as well.”

Mr Quin said that for those business customers who were particularly affected by outages, Telecom had well-established processes for dealing with customer concerns on a case by case basis.

“We have been doing just that over the past few days through our call centres with residential customers. Gen-i is also managing the issue of compensation for its clients on an individual basis but we recognise not all customers were affected in the same way, so a “one size fits all” approach is inappropriate.”

The free calling will run from 12.01 Christmas morning right through until 11.59pm. It will be available to all Telecom fixed line residential customers – not just those broadband customers affected by the outages.

Mr Quin said the WiFi holiday hotspots are an exciting initiative that Telecom is trialling over the holidays to help customers stay connected. The trials had already been planned prior to the broadband outages, but Telecom now wanted to ensure all its customers were aware of them, as those Broadband customers who were going to be away from home on Christmas Day might not be able to take advantage of the free calling.

The outages were initially caused by an error during a software upgrade on one of the broadband network’s two main servers in the early hours of Tuesday morning (11th December). Although the initial problem was resolved within several hours, there were unanticipated flow-on effects on other parts of the network that caused further problems from late Tuesday evening and throughout the night. The network was running normally again from around 10am Wednesday 12th December.

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• Excludes landline to mobile, international and 0900 calls.
• Includes business national landline calls but not local or 0800 calls.

ENDS

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