Fonterra turned off XT network by outages

Fonterra's postponement of a full XT roll-out is not a good sign for Telecom's business customers on the high-speed network.

Dairy giant Fonterra is postponing the roll-out of Telecom's XT network for approximately 3000 staff, 1500 of whom were to be brought across from Vodafone in a deal announced last September.

The postponement follows two serious XT outages in the past two months, a Fonterra spokeswoman confirmed.

The decision was made jointly with Telecom's Gen-i Services unit, she said of the contract, which is reported to have been for a three-year period and would have converted Fonterra staff using the old Telecom CDMA network and Vodafone users to XT.

Around a third of staff had already been moved across to the XT platform at the time of the recent outages, which had their most severe impact in the lower South Island earlier this month.

Telecom's first-half profit results are due out tomorrow.

While the outages post-date the period, commentary on the impact of the XT outages, the independent inquiry into the failures appears inevitable, as does an impact on XT customer growth until the platform is proven to be trustworthy.