Anthony Doesburg: Telecom competitor in no mood to start gloating

You won't catch Mike Goss gloating over the misfortunes of Telecom and its XT mobile network. Given that he works for rival cellular network operator 2degrees, that's somewhat surprising.

With Telecom giving away 2degrees SIM cards to customers for whom cellular services are critical, it's doubly surprising.

But Goss, who is 2degrees' technology chief, knows the boot could easily be on the other foot. The fact of the matter, he says, is that designing and building a 3G network such as Telecom's is difficult.

"Planning for 3G is extremely complicated. You have to look at resiliency and redundancy in major network elements.

"It's not something that is unique to Telecom, it's a problem we all face."

Goss has had more experience at building cellular networks than most. For the West Australian, the 2degrees network is his second in New Zealand.

In the early 1990s, he was responsible for the design of BellSouth's network, the original rival to Telecom that was eventually bought by Vodafone.

Having had a hand in building or managing a dozen networks in various parts of the world, Goss doesn't think Telecom's troubles can be put down to anything about New Zealand's physical environment.

"It's no different building a network here than building a network anywhere else. I was aware of the topographic and design constraints having been in this market before."

Austria, where in 2000 he oversaw the expansion of the tele.ring network from 1000 cell sites to 3000, threw up more geographical challenges than New Zealand did.

"It has a lot more villages up in the mountains than we have here in New Zealand."

The feature of the New Zealand landscape that is really troublesome is man-made, not geographic, Goss says.

"The town planning process here is harder than anywhere else in the world.

"While you have the Resource Management Act, and it's well documented, you find 80 versions of it when you go to the councils - every one has its own variation."

Before building his first cellular network for Telecom Australia (now Telstra) in 1984, Goss worked in radio and television transmission. The broadcasting and mobile phone worlds might appear to have little in common, but they depend on the same medium - radio waves.

"Basically, you're managing coverage and interference - it's no different."

Where mobile networks start to get tricky is in the transition from 2G to 3G, from second to third-generation networks. to start gloating

2degrees began offering services last August over a 2G network, about a quarter of which has since been overlaid with 3G capability.

While 3G makes mobile access to the internet and email faster, it's also more prone to interference. In bowl-shaped Wellington, where radio signals are contained by the hills, network design is especially challenging.

2degrees is far from being a match yet for Vodafone or Telecom in terms of network coverage. It has just 500 cell sites in the three main centres, with plans for a further 778 over the next couple of years, to cover 90 per cent of the population.

Where its network doesn't reach, it has a roaming agreement with Vodafone, which claims 97 per cent population coverage. It's a "lean, mean" network so far, Goss says, making it vulnerable to the same sort of problems Telecom has been having. But in the next phase of development, key parts of the network will be duplicated in case a part breaks.

He doesn't attribute XT's flakiness to poor-quality equipment, saying he has built networks using the same Alcatel-Lucent hardware. 2degrees' network is supplied by Chinese company Huawei, but Goss wouldn't criticise any particular equipment maker.

While not knowing the details of the Telecom network design, he says it would not have been possible to foresee the component failure that brought XT down.

The subsequent overloading of a critical radio network controller, or RNC, was the unfortunate consequence.

"Once an RNC is fully loaded it is very difficult to bring it down and reboot it - it can take many hours.

"It's a function of the complexity. You have to remove the load off the RNC in the first place, bring it down, reboot it without a load, and then bring the network back up."

He was confronted with something similar when the Austrian network he managed was overwhelmed by new customers, so Telecom's engineers have his sympathy.

"Equipment failure is beyond your control and in this case I felt for them because we all face the same potential risk."

If the short-term answer for Telecom is to steer customers towards 2degrees, he's not complaining.

"It's a real compliment they recognise we have a good network and we're more than happy to have them sell as many SIM cards as they like."