Should network reliability be reported on independently?
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Posted Thu 4 March 2010 @ 7:54 p.m. by Ernie Newman
A while ago on this blog I noted that Telecom's is by no means the only network to fail or go down from time to time.
A TUANZ member in the health sector has emailed reinforcing my comment, and made a suggestion that I think should be taken seriously. I quote:
"The recent XT outages have demonstrated to us all that cellular communications is an important part of society, and as such we rely on the technology for business, emergency assistance, and social interactions - arguably we
rely on it too much sometimes!!
"XT has had its media "thumping", yet we all know that other providers have their own outages, but they are not declared or published.
"I believe we should be asking for transparency and uptime/availability
from all providers. Cellular is critical service for society, it should
be reported on, and made available to us the users."
Now there's an idea. In many countries airlines are monitored for punctuality. In New Zealand the Commerce Commission monitors broadband speeds. Why not have a bit more exposure of mobile network reliability?
Right now there's extreme sensitivity around XT. If a seagull's seen sitting on a cell site at Seatoun, it gets in the paper.
But if Vodafone has an outage (as happens quite often on a small scale and as recently as last night for some data services) nobody gets to know.
I think a reporting regime is an idea whose time has come. It needn't be big or expensive, and would allow customers to assess network reliability when choosing the appropriate network supplier.
Categories: Fixed line carriers | Wireless carriers