WELLINGTON - Vodafone's 293,000 mobile phone customers may face short delays around midnight on New Year's Eve - not because of the Y2K bug, but because of overloading.
The company says emergency calls to police or the Fire Service will not get higher priority on the network because the technology isnot available here.
"We have prepared the network for minimum downtimes. We are not expecting major outages, and if there is congestion it should be short-term," Vodafone engineering director Arthur Neely said.
In an emergency callers should "keep hitting the button."
No mobile operators had priority queues for emergency 111 calls in this country.
Vodafone's parent company in Britain is understood to have introduced priority calling for emergency calls, but from a different system supplier to the New Zealand firm.
Priority calling should be introduced next year, Mr Neely said.
If people making social calls experienced delays they should "sit back, have another glass of champagne" and try a minute or two later.
Telecom spokesman Clive Litt said the chance of congestion on landline or mobile phone systems was very small on New Year's Eve.
"We handle New Year and Christmas peaks and they don't cause any problem in our network," he said.
Years ago people had to book to make calls at such peak times.
"There is a considerable amount of capacity in our networks, and it handles predictable peaks," he said.
Mobile phone overloading was possible on New Year's Eve because of the millennium event, but it was unlikely and would be short, Mr Litt said.
Once calls were within the Telecom landline network, emergency calls got priority. Most mobile emergency calls went through without problems, he said.
Mobile phone users will get three beeps on the line when the system is overloaded.
Events in New Zealand will provide an early warning for the international Vodafone group, which has more than 31 million customers across 24 countries in all time zones, including Australia, Britain and the United States.
