Telecom: XT can cope despite glitch

Telecom XT users south of Taupo again suffered as 20 per cent of text messages sent on the troubled network failed on the first attempt.

Telecom has assured users its capacity can cope with peak-time traffic after a glitch made parts of the XT mobile network fail.

The company said texting and voicemail services were disrupted for some customers south of Taupo between 4pm and 11pm on Monday.

The intermittent fault meant 20 per cent of text messages failed to send on the first attempt.

The Herald received complaints from customers in Hastings, Wellington and Invercargill.

In the early evening Telecom denied there was any network fault. But at 11pm it admitted that SMS texting and voicemail services had been affected.

Telecom spokesman Mark Watts said it was not in a position until late Monday night to explain the extent of the disruption.

A Telecom statement said the problem was caused by an "unusual" pattern of text message traffic. The peak time for texting was between 4pm and 10pm.

An investigation was under way to find the cause of the problem.

Mr Watts said it was not a major outage and should not be compared to the XT network hardware failure which affected calling, data, and SMS in the same regions between January 27 and 29.

Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Ernie Newman said the problem was very different in scale to the previous outages, but any disruption lasting for more than a few minutes should be considered major.

He said the fact that Telecom couldn't identify the cause of the problem added to his concern.

"They haven't at any point said 'we know what is wrong and we're fixing it'. It's a problem of far less magnitude, but it's a third failure, which we already said they can't afford. It must start costing them customer numbers."

Telecom said it would continue to monitor the network very closely and that it was still bringing new capacity into play as customer demand increased.