Telecom sales staff are knocking on doors around the country to poach broadband customers from ihug and Slingshot, even though the telco giant has admitted causing some of the network problems that have affected them.
Over the past few months, Slingshot and ihug customers have had periods where
they have been unable to connect to the internet.
Telecom staff are pitching the Xtra broadband product by discussing its rivals' difficulties.
Slingshot and ihug use Telecom's network to sell their broadband products and believe most of the problems have been with Telecom's network - not their own equipment.
Ihug regulatory manager David Diprose said he was aware that Telecom was taking advantage of ihug's situation to sell Xtra broadband.
Whangaparaoa resident Ian Erasmus said a Telecom salesman came to his house this week offering free installation of Xtra broadband.
"I told him, no, I have broadband already. He said, 'Are you also having outages with your current provider?"'
Erasmus, a Slingshot customer, said he was still having problems with his home internet access and with his ihug account at work.
Callplus acting chief executive Mark Callander said he realised that Telecom was door-knocking but was unaware that it was exploiting the problems of ihug and Callplus to gain customers.
"This is a very blatant move from Telecom considering the problems are not affecting their own Xtra internet service."
Telecom spokeswoman Sarah Berry said it did run "regular marketing campaigns" including door-to-door efforts to promote its broadband services and it had done so over the past 18 months.
"It's just business as usual for us to contact customers and see if they want our services," said Berry.
Diprose said he was concerned that Telecom had not identified many of the problems but was still trying to fix the network.
"Our concern is because they don't know what is causing some of these outages, the changes they are doing could be causing some of these outages and the flow-on effect could be noticed later," said Diprose.
