FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
Story image
Vodafone sorry for service disruption
Mon, 8th Mar 2010
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Vodafone has apologised to customers affected by a network failure in the weekend which affected customers in the Bay of Plenty.

In a press release, the company says that 16 sites were affected, which meant that on Saturday some customers in the Bay of Plenty had 2G capability and some had 3G capability intermittently. All sites were up and running by 2.40pm on Saturday.

“Vodafone would like to apologise for an impact of inconvenience cause to our customers,” says the release. “Vodafone is fully focussed on ensuring this kind of issue does not happen again and would like to apologise to those affected by the weekend’s events.”

Company spokesperson Paul Brislen says the fault occurred about 8.30am on Saturday. He says it’s hard to tell how many customers were affected “but it’s in the dozens.” TR asked if the company would be offering compensations:

“There was no outage so in that instance, no. When there is a problem we offer compensation on a case-by-case basis, but there was no loss of service as such in this case,” he says.

According to the press release the fault occurred during one a planned network upgrade to cabling between Taupiri and Horotiu by one of Vodafone’s fibre network provider’s FX Networks.

“The work was not expected to impact services to Vodafone customers, however a fault was triggered during the work and the automated network fail over did not take place as expected. The resulting disruption to service was clearly Vodafone’s responsibility and we acknowledge that FX Networks was not to blame,” the release says.

Overall Vodafone operates around 1300 cellsites throughout New Zealand.