Telecom to compensate for broadband glitch

Friday 17th June 2011 4 Comments

Telecom says a difficult to trace software glitch was responsible for over-counting customers' broadband usage and it will compensate the nearly 40,000 people affected.

The error meant that since November, some landline broadband customers may have reached their data cap earlier in the month than they should have and would have been incorrectly charged or had their connection speed slowed.

Telecom was apologising to those customers.

The glitch affected about 7%, or nearly 40,000 of Telecom's more than 600,000 customers, Telecom spokeswoman Katherine Murphy said.

The problem was an abnormal software issue, a progressive fault that grew over time.

Less than 10 had reported it as a problem since November, which meant it took longer to diagnose, Murphy said.

It would take a few weeks to contact all the affected customers and calculate their compensation. It was too early to say how much it would cost, she said.

The software fault had been fixed. It did not affect mobile broadband.

NZPA

Comments from our readers

On 18 June 2011 at 1:17 pm tony teague said:

I have been phoning telecom for the last 5 months re my broudband usage. all i get in reply was that it was my problem at my end, It cost me over $1000 to get a computer tec to check it for me. now i find out it was telecoms problem. Will they refund my costs and time lost!! I will be contacting them monday for sure

On 18 June 2011 at 1:56 pm Philip Tuuta said:

Have we been affected by the broadband usage fault? How do we know were weren't because we were advised that we had used up our data quota several times this year.

On 18 June 2011 at 3:37 pm Dr BRS Hegde said:

It is nice gesture on the part of Telecom

On 13 September 2011 at 4:38 pm Martin said:

Telecom have been overcount at approximately 5 to 6 times the actual amount of data we have data device that send aproximatelt 3 GB a month Telecom has been charging us for years for 17 to 18 GB we currently have a 12 devices. We are talking thousnads of dollars Telecom offered $110 credit