Telecom offers $5 million in credits in sorry note for XT network failure

Tuesday 2nd February 2010

Telecom said it would extend $5 million of free calls, Internet and messaging in compensation for customers affected by the outage on its XT network last week.

All XT customers in areas south of Taupo through to the bottom of the South Island will be credited for the network failure, chief executive Paul Reynolds said in a statement. Telecom will also donate more than $250,000 to community projects in the lower South Island, he said.

“We make this gesture in recognition of the inconvenience and frustration the outage caused our customers, but we fully appreciate that what our customers most need is to have confidence that we are putting every conceivable effort into ensuring the XT network delivers for our customers,” he said.

Shares of Telecom rose 0.4% to $2.38, snapping a three-day slide. Last week, Reynolds was forced to apologise and demand an urgent and independent inquiry into the company’s new mobile network after its second failure in as many months.

Telecom had been successful in migrating customers on to XT, with 242,000 people signed up by the end of the first quarter, from 149,000 in the period prior. Customers whose service was degraded on Wednesday 27 January:
- Prepaid consumer customers - $10 credit;
- Postpaid consumer customers – One week's worth of plan charges, including Telecom Extras, such as texting or data packages;
- Telecom Retail SME customers and Gen-i corporate customers – Two weeks' worth of plan charges, including Telecom Extras, such as texting or data packages.

Customers whose service was severely impacted for up to three days between Wednesday 27 January and 10pm Friday 29 January:
- Prepaid consumer customers - $20 credit;
- Postpaid consumer customers – Two weeks' worth of plan charges, including Telecom Extras, such as texting or data packages;
- Telecom Retail SME customers and Gen-i corporate customers – Four weeks' worth of plan charges, including Telecom Extras, such as texting or data packages.

Businesswire.co.nz

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