8 December 2000
Telecom is apologising to mobile phone customers after a fault on the 025 network over a few hours this morning.
Customers may have experienced intermittent problems from around 7:00 am but Telecom restored service progressively from
around 10:40 am.
The fault had cleared completely by 12:10 pm.
Calls to the emergency services 111 network were not affected.
"The fault affected much less of the network than we first thought," Telecom's General Manager Mobility, Lorraine Witten
says.
"Further, the impact on customers was intermittent, and the majority of those customers affected were pre-paid
customers. They tend to make vastly fewer calls than those on post-paid call plans, and to avoid peak-time calling," she
says.
"The disruption was caused by a software problem and we are working with our software supplier Ericsson to ensure it
does not happen again," Ms Witten says.
"Our mobile network is one of the best in the world - and it has been almost five years since we had a problem on this
scale," Ms Witten says.
"But this sort of disruption is not acceptable to us and we apologise to those who were affected," she says.