Vodafone apologises for service problems
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Posted Mon 8 March 2010 @ 4:05 p.m. by Ernie Newman
There's huge sensitivity around the matter of outages and reliability of mobile networks at present, but today's events underline it with special force.
Readers of this blog will know the commendable speed at which Voda spokesman Paul Brislen leaps to his company's defence if we post any comment critical of its performance.
Yesterday (Sunday), the ever-vigilant Paul was up with the sparrows and nto my mobile to draw attention to an article in the Sunday Star Times saying there had been service issues with Vodafone in the Bay of Plenty. It quoted no less an authority than Paul himself, who placed the blame fairly and squarely on backhaul supplier FX Networks. But it seemed the SST had the story wrong and Paul, knowing that mobile reliability is a source of much interest to TUANZ at present, wanted me to know the facts before I published anything on this Blog.
So as it was Sunday, I was in a charitable mood, and there seemed to be some doubt around, I didn't post anything.
Yet this morning I opened the Herald only to see the same story.
But that's not all. This afternoon Vodafone has issued this statement about what it calls network "Issues"
"On Saturday, one of Vodafone’s fibre network providers FX Networks began a planned network upgrade to cabling between Taupiri and Horotiu.
"The work was not expected to impact service to Vodafone customers, however a fault was triggered during the work and the automated network fail over did not take place as expected. The resulting disruption to service was clearly Vodafone’s responsibility and we acknowledge that FX networks was not at fault.
"This issue affected 16 sites in the Bay of Plenty to varying degrees. Some had 2G capability, some had 3G capability intermittently. Overall Vodafone operates around 1300 cellsites throughout New Zealand.
"All 16 sites were back up and running by 2.40pm on Saturday.
"Vodafone would like to apologise for any impact or inconvenience caused to our customers. Vodafone is fully focused on ensuring this kind of issues does not happen again and would like to apologise to those affected by the weekend’s events."
So they've clarified and apologised and that's good. But let me make one point.
Mobile networks are complex. In a perfect world they'd stay up and running. But it isn’t, and they don't always. So when a competitor has a failure on the scale of XT, it seems to me there's something inherently ghoulish and tasteless about other networks rubbing their noses in it. Something about glass houses and stones?
Flick across all Telecom's competitors' home pages and see how they are competing with each other to capitalise on the situation. Its ugly.
And its always dangerous to pass the blame to somebody else unless you are absolutely, absolutely sure. Telecom to its credit accepted responsibility on behalf of its customers all along; any assigning of blame to Alcatel Lucent its been done in a low key and considered way. By contrast Vodafone, it seems, couldn't wait to flick all the blame to FX - it didn't even wait long enough to get its facts right. Now its had to apologise not only to its customers, but to FX as well.
Maybe there should be a pact in the industry not to gloat about competitors' misfortunes.
In the end, that activity erodes consumer confidence not just in one network, but in the entire industry.
There's something for the mobile carriers, and perhaps the Telecommunications Industry Group, to mull over. Maybe they could chat about it over a coffee this weekend at "Planet."
Categories: Wireless carriers