Angry with Telecom? We'll pay break fee, says Vodafone

Photo / Bay of Plenty Times

Vodafone will today announce a fresh offensive to capitalise on Telecom's ongoing woes.

Paul Brislen, Vodafone spokesman, said the company would refund any Telecom customers penalised for switching mobile phone providers.

Under the deal to be announced this morning, angry Telecom customers can change to Vodafone and keep the same phone number - and be credited the amount they are charged for breaking their contract.

That amount varies but in one case, Mr Brislen said, a customer had to pay $1500 to leave Telecom.

The aggressive attempt to snatch business and consumer customers comes as Telecom faced more problems yesterday.

A software fault meant one third of 111 calls in Auckland failed to connect between about 3.30am and 8.20am.

The company said the latest fault was not related to crashes in its XT network, which has broken down at least four times between December and this week, at times leaving 220,000 people without service.

Emergency services spent yesterday trying to find out if incidents were not attended as a result of the fault.

National manager of police communications centres Superintendent Andy McGregor said 99 calls got through during the outage.

Of 33 calls that did not get through, 20 were for police and the rest were for fire and ambulance. Telecom staff said they had spoken to all of the callers.

Police were double-checking this and by last night had spoken to all but two of the callers.

Minister for Communications and Technology Steven Joyce said he was concerned by the outages on the 111 service which was Telecom's highest priority. He said members of the public could be assured the matter was being treated with urgency.

He would know by Monday how long a review into the outage would take. The review would consider why the software failed, why backup services did not work and why police were not informed until one of their officers called but failed to get through.

Fire northern communications centre manager Peter Stevenson said there had been "no impact that we're aware of" from the outage. "That time of day is not really a busy time for fire."

St John Ambulance spokesman Alan Goudge said two calls to ambulance were followed up by Telecom staff, who connected the callers with staff.

Telecom said it would conduct an immediate review into yesterday's problems.