Telecom XT users face wait for compo news

Telecom CEO Paul Reynolds hopes that cell sites still affected by the outage will be running by tomorrow morning. Photo / Steven McNicholl

Thousands of Telecom XT mobile customers who have had their service cut off since Wednesday morning will have to wait until next week to hear news of compensation, the company's chief executive said today.

The problem had affected about 4 per cent of the network south of Taupo.

About 30 cell sites were this afternoon still without service. They were based in the lower South Island, including Timaru, Invercargill, Dunedin and Queenstown and a number of sites across rural Southland, Otago and South Canterbury.

The cause of the outage was now under extensive investigation, but was suspected to be within the transport layer between the cell site and the Christchurch switch, the company said in a statement.

This was a different issue to the one that caused a disruption of services in December.

Telecom chief executive Paul Reynolds said he hoped the remaining affected sites to be running by tomorrow morning.

"The clear signal we have had from customers is that they want the issue resolved, so that has been our full focus today. Now we have a clear plan, the time is right to think about compensation.

"We will be announcing compensation plans for significantly affected customers early next week," Dr Reynolds said.

Meanwhile, the cellphone problem has caused major disruption at the New Zealand Masters Games in Dunedin.

"Try running the country's largest sporting event without cell phone coverage, it's a joke," games manager Aaron Joy said.

"It's not a contingency we planned for, you expect that you can rely on Telecom. I am unable to make or receive calls or texts, nobody can get hold of me, frankly communication here is by pigeons. I've got to rely on other people to get messages through.

"I've missed so many phone calls and people think that I'll get the message they have left for me but of course I don't."

Tomorrow the Games were due to begin with thousands of competitors competing in 71 activities.

Mr Joy said if the outage continued they would think about changing providers.

- NZPA