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Telecom has stepped in to a slanging match with rivals about the thousands of lost broadband connections suffered by ihug and Slingshot customers over the past few weeks, blaming the companies themselves for the faults.
Over the past few weeks ihug and Slingshot - which use Telecom's broadband network - have suffered faults causing their customers to lose connection with the internet for hours at a time. Both have blamed Telecom.
But Telecom chief operating officer Mark Ratcliffe told the Business Herald that "relatively few" of the problems tracked back to an issue with the Telecom network.
Observers say the problem has got worse since late October, when Telecom's broadband network went unconstrained - meaning it was delivering the fastest possible internet speeds to its retail customers. At the same time, Telecom's competitors introduced new retail broadband plans to try to remain compeititve with the faster Telecom plans.
Ihug and Slingshot were "not geared up" for the large migration of customers on to new broadband plans, he said.
"That is what is largely causing the problem, the volume of reauthentication that needs to go on inside our wholesale customers' networks, not ours," said Ratcliffe.
Reauthentication is an internet serviced provider's process for checking a customer has the authority to sign on.
Ratcliffe said the internet companies invested in their own infrastructure, routing and reauthentication equipment to support their delivery of broadband via Telecom's network.
Ihug and Slingshot had a "disproportionate' number of outages compared to other internet firms such as TelstraClear and Orcon, which had not reported outage problems, he said.
"We are getting a massive amount of noise from two internet service providers and none from any of the rest of them," said Ratcliffe.
But Telecom was engaged in dialogue with ihug and Slingshot to sort through the problems. Ratcliffe agreed Telecom's Xtra broadband had also experienced problems.
"As well as a massive migration to broadband, we are fronting on a global basis another spam war. About 95 per cent of the email traffic we carry through the Xtra network is spam."
