Stalemate for Net access battlers

By CHRIS BARTON

Attempts by i4free and Telecom to negotiate a solution to comply with a High Court order that internet services be rationed equally through the Airedale St exchange in central Auckland have failed.

No agreement had been reached by late yesterday and i4free was still signing up new customers, but only letting the 8000 who had signed up by Saturday access the free service.

The parties go back to the court today to argue two points: whether i4free's porting of its 0867 numbers to Clear's network fits with Telecom's 0867 contract; and whether Telecom's attempts to restrict i4free's service contravene the anti-competitive provisions of the Commerce Act.

The affidavits came thick and slow to the court on Friday, with two arriving just before 6 pm, an hour after the second injunction hearing, brought by i4free against Telecom, started.

During that time Jim Farmer, QC, had presented i4free's case: that Telecom had broken the previous injunction granted on Monday ordering it to reconnect i4free's disconnected lines.

He pointed out that Telecom had chosen to put i4free's lines on the Airedale exchange and could easily move the lines to another exchange - a process that took about 10 minutes - if Airedale was so overloaded.

Mr Farmer also suggested, based on an affidavit from Clear network manager and former Telecom network manager Ken Benson, that Telecom might consider spreading the load across several exchanges.

If Airedale was under threat of overloading, Mr Farmer said Telecom could also have imposed restrictions on all internet service providers - but chose instead to target the two free providers, freenet and i4free.

He questioned how 500 to 600 simultaneous calls could cause such a big problem, when an internet provider such as Ihug had 6000 to 8000 simultaneous calls.

Telecom lawyer Jack Hodder said the problem related more to the capacity of the trunks between the Airedale exchange and the four "tandem" exchanges that all local Auckland calls pass through.

Based on the affidavit of technical specialist David Mawby, who works at Telecom's Network Control Centre in Hamilton, Mr Hodder explained how the trunks from Airedale had gone from about 75 "erlangs," or about 35 per cent capacity in February, to about 70 per cent capacity by the end of last month - a growth surge that followed the launch of freenet.

I4free, which started this month, compounded Airedale's woes, causing a peak of 210 erlangs, or nearly 100 per cent capacity, last Tuesday.

Mr Hodder said some of the problem was attributed to the "tromboning effect" where calls for i4free and freenet come into Airedale through the tandem exchanges and were then turned around and sent back to the tandem exchanges for onward passage to the Clear network.

The in-and-out effect meant there were two calls for every one to the provider.

To address the problem Telecom started limiting the number of simultaneous calls for both freenet and i4free to bring the exchange back to about 85 per cent capacity.

Justice Judith Potter ruled that Telecom could not single out the free services and if it had to place call management on the Airedale exchange it should do so proportionately on all 0867-prefixed numbers.

Since the ruling both parties have been trying to find an alternative solution, one of which involved distributing i4free's lines across five local exchanges.