Cellphone calls swamped during races

By NICK PERRY

The winds on the Hauraki Gulf may be light but the airwaves are so heavy with the crackle of cellphones that calls are being blown out of the water.

In preparation for the America's Cup racing, Telecom ensured it had double the coverage on the gulf than for its cellphone heartland of Queen St - yet some people are still not getting through.

Vodafone said it was experiencing heavy traffic offshore and right up the East Coast Bays during racing, leading to some people getting the beep, beep, beep, busy line.

Vodafone spokesman Mark Champion said it had extended the capacity on all its cell sites in the area "but there is still congestion."

Telecom spokesman Glen Sowry said it had set up temporary cell sites on Motutapu and Tiritiri Matangi islands, as well as increasing the capacity of its Torbay site.

It had installed several extra relayers in the American Express NZ Cup Village.

Mr Sowry said there were still times, such as at the end of a race, when callers might have trouble getting through. They should try calling again a few minutes later.

Calls were not normally cut off mid-sentence once a connection was made, and signals travelled well across the water.

Mr Sowry said the race yachts sent out global position signals five times a second across the Telecom network, which enabled race graphics to be shown on television. The signals had run flawlessly.

Meanwhile, TVNZ spokesman Liam Jeory said the patchy television coverage some boats were experiencing in the gulf had nothing to do with the quantity of airwave traffic.

Rather it was because its network was not equipped to broadcast to areas where no one lived.

"If people are picking up TV out there it is by chance rather than design."

Mr Jeory said a digital system had been set up to ensure its own camerawork on the gulf came through consistently on televisions around the country.

A relayer on the Sky Tower sent and received signals that were decoded on broadcasting boats and helicopters.

Anyone with a decoder box could pick up the final transmission, and 50 superyachts and charter boats had snapped up the spare decoders TVNZ owned.

The technology investment by TVNZ appears to be paying off. The first race between Prada and Team New Zealand last Sunday attracted a near-record 73 per cent of television viewers, a figure matched again on Tuesday.

During the racing the viewing matched figures for the 1996 All Blacks rugby test win over the Springboks in South Africa.

On Tuesday the figure was 72 per cent.

A village spokeswoman said sales of memorabilia had picked up after a slow start.

Stars and Stripes leader Dennis Conner, knocked out in the semifinals of the challenger series, is offering cut-price T-shirts.