Telescum

NAPIER: Users may experience five minute cut outs between connections. The Solution seems to be a complete factory reset of the modem (don't ask why either)

PALMERSTON NORTH: Users may experience complete cut off from the ADSL Service, should be up and running tomorrow

EVERYWHERE: The Xtra Usage System is down, so download, download, download!!!!!

Have fun!!

The official statement says:

"The Commission has decided to prosecute Telecom and Xtra for alleged breaches of the Fair Trading Act in that the companies allegedly engaged in conduct that was liable to mislead the public as to the characteristics of services and made false or misleading representations about the performance characteristics of the Go Large plan"

This years Consumer Institutes ISP survey has put Xtra at the bottom of the list with most customers voting it the worst ISP for the third year in a row.

Only 42% surveyed said Xtra was good, or very good.
25% surveyed rated Xtra as poor, or very poor, making it the lowest scoring ISP in NZ by a large margin.

This was in wake of empty promises on Xtra's behalf, and multiple, avoidable outages.

Once again, lack of redundancy on behalf of Telecom has caused intergral and emergency services to go offline for the most part. Around 6.05am on Sunday the power to a network building on Mayoral Drive was cut, affecting broadband, email authentication, as well as Telecom's own and other customers computer services such as databases, paging systems and eftpos.

Power wasn't restored until around 9.15am.

Staff in 111 call centres had to use pen and paper and write down the information to give to police, fire and ambulance. Luckily no emergency calls were missed.

The Telecommunications Service Obligations is an agreement between the government and Telecom to keep line rentals cheap (by linking them to the CPI), and provide free local calling. However now it is stifling investing in networks.

The government released a discussion document in August on the agreement in, set up 17 years ago when Telecom was privatised.

TUANZ, in a submission on the document has stated that the TSO is stopping companies from introducing new technology and putting money into networks, and creating unintended "perverse and anticompetitive" consequences.

OK, so we probably already knew this but the president of Internet protocol for French telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent says "Anything that can support business in an efficient way is critical for an economy."

That president is Basil Alwan, and is in NZ this week.

Telecom is pulling the plug on sponsoring technology in NZ schools.

It has stated that it is cutting the 14 year programme because its objectives have been met. However it is trying to find sponsors to continue with the project. So does that mean the objectives weren't met, or only Telecom's objectives were met?

The programme has pushed $120 million dollars into schools since it started in 1993.

Another one bites the dust.

Kevin Kenrick, the Chief Operating Officer Consumer is leaving Telecom to take up a role as CEO of House of Travel.

Kevin was responsible for the disastrous change to Yahoo Mail [TBC] and the decommissioning of the old 025 network [TBC].

Scoop: Open in Window | Link

Yahoo!Xtra

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.

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.