Telescum

Did they pay her to leave I wonder?

Former Telecom head Theresa Gattung left New Zealand's biggest publicly listed company with $5.125 million in cash and 12 weeks annual leave owing.

The company's latest annual report, issued yesterday, shows Ms Gattung received a leaving payment of $3.9 million on top of her $1.25 million salary.

It included a performance incentive scheme (also known as a rip-off-nation incentive) of $1,525,000, a long-term incentive of $550,000 and special payments of $1,800,000.

AAPT customers fume at call centre delays

A customer complained it's taken nine weeks to get broadband while some helpdesk callers were put on hold for two hours

Telecom's Australian subsidary, AAPT, has customers fuming over slow call centre response times and hold-ups in getting phone and internet services switched on, after hitches with its new customer management system.

Telecom had hoped the new $100 million online customer management system - know as Hyperbaric - would boost profits by allowing it to reduce call centre staff and retain customers.

Telecom just does not seem to be able to learn, writes The Press in an editorial. The botching two weeks ago of the switch of its Xtra email service to Yahoo!Xtra Bubble was richly evocative of the lumbering and arrogant Telecom of old.

Not only did the technical changeover go catastrophically wrong for thousands of customers, its response to customer complaints was also a disaster. Telecom's call-centre service was already notoriously an automated nightmare but under the deluge last week it was hopelessly inadequate.

Telecom's grip on the phone and internet market was further loosened yesterday as the Commerce Commission announced the prices its rivals will pay to provide broadband without renting a phone line.

Telcos will soon be able to provide unbundled bitstream, also known as Naked DSL, which will allow consumers to ditch their phone line and use broadband to make phone calls.

Xtra customers are being given one week's free internet as an apology for recent email problems - at a cost of up to $6 million to Telecom.

The company also said it would also be donating $1 million to charity.

Chief operating officer Kevin Kenrick said the gesture is an acknowledgment of the inconvenience and frustration that many email customers faced as Telecom upgraded its service last week.

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Xtra customers are being given one week's free internet as an apology for recent email problems - at a cost of up to $6 million to Telecom.

The company also said it would also be donating $1 million to charity.

Chief operating officer Kevin Kenrick said the gesture is an acknowledgment of the inconvenience and frustration that many email customers faced as Telecom upgraded its service last week.

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Telecom will seek a new Chief Financial Officer with experience in mergers and acquisition so it can take advantage of consolidation in the telecommunications market, says chairman Wayne Boyd.

Chief financial officer Marko Bogoievski announced his resignation yesterday - to take effect next January - after more than seven years at the phone company and seven weeks after it appointed BT executive Paul Reynolds as its new chief executive.

Boyd said Bogoievski's replacement would have a strategic, rather than purely financial, focus.

A clip from Campbell live about the Yahoo!Xtra email outage. The guy seems quite nervous...

2:42PM Thursday August 09, 2007
By Matt Greenop

Local loop unbundling took a huge step today as ihug CEO Mark Rushworth took his "shiny red DSLAM" box into a Telecom exchange.

"It was big," he said, "as big as when I was 16 and my dad gave me the keys to the Cortina for the first time."

A trial started today in the Ponsonby and Glenfield Telecom exchanges in Auckland as part of the long-awaited unbundling of the local loop, which allows ISPs to pay a per-customer fee to access Telecom's copper wire network.

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