Sabotage claim as phone maintenance falls behind

Photo / Thinkstock

Maintenance of Auckland's telephone network at its worst in years - but the company in charge denies taking up to five days to fix faults.

One technician claims workers are under huge work and financial pressures - and some are deliberately damaging the network to get more money for repairs.

Australian-owned Visionstream told its subcontractors last week that the business was "going through the worst performance" it had experienced since taking over maintenance of the region's fixed-line network in 2009.

The company asked all installation and fault technicians to postpone days off between June 28 and July 8, and acknowledged that this came on top of having staff working every weekend for the previous nine weeks.

"For the last nine weeks, on average up to 1000 customers per day in the Visionstream-managed areas have had their service impacted in one form or another," the internal memo said.

A technician, who asked to remain anonymous but has worked on the Telecom network for 37 years, claimed many subcontractors were deliberately damaging underground cables to get more money for repairs.

Visionstream paid them only a flat $80 for above-ground repairs that could take several hours, but $400 to fix underground cables.

"So what you have is people going out and damaging the network for reward."

He said 900 line maintenance technicians worked for Telecom's previous contractors in Auckland and Northland.

There are now only 350 after Visionstream switched to a subcontracting system in 2009.

"The bulk of them are unskilled people who have come from overseas," the technician said.

He said repairing a fault for $80 might take three hours and did not cover the costs of time, equipment, travel and insurance for a self-employed contractor.

Visionstream general manager Andrew Stevens said the company caught up with the backlog of faults at the weekend.

"No one has ever had to wait five days. It's measured in hours," he said. "Every year in winter there is a higher volume of faults because the network itself is prone to ingress of moisture."

He said the anonymous technician's claims were wrong and "insult our hard-working contractors".

Telecom network company Chorus said Visionstream had cut the average time taken to repair faults by 10 per cent in the past year.

Chorus spokesman Robin Kelly said: "In the last month, they have repaired more than 21,000 phone and broadband faults within 30 hours of customers reporting them."