KEY POINTS:
Frustration is growing for some Pukekohe residents who are still without telephones after a Telecom system failure last week.
A software fault at the Pukekohe Exchange on Thursday affected about 10,000 landlines in the area.
Telecom said yesterday afternoon that only a small number of lines were still out of action, but the company could not say when the problem would be completely fixed.
Pukekohe resident John Cocks still didn't have a landline when the Herald spoke to him on his mobile phone yesterday afternoon.
"We had no dial tone at all and now we have an engaged signal sound and you can't dial in or out."
Mr Cocks, who runs a building business, has one landline number for his home, business and fax.
"We can't receive anything business-wise and unless somebody knows my mobile number, it gets a bit hard."
He said his sister called his landline, but kept being put through to somebody else's house.
Mr Cocks rang the woman at that house, who said she'd received several business calls for him.
"It hasn't been very good ... I hate to think how much business I'm losing, not to mention the extra cost from having to use my cellphone."
Telecom spokesman Mark Watts said he expected services to have been "largely restored" by last night.
"There's still some mopping up and further work to be done in some areas. We are working through that as methodically and as quickly as we can."
He apologised to affected customers, saying, "we have worked hard to get on top of it and give customers what they need again."
He said residential customers who had been without their landlines for more than 24 hours would be credited a month's free rental.
"Not all of these lines would have been disconnected for that long because restoration started fairly early on in the piece."
Business customers, however, would need to talk to Telecom about any possible compensation.
"We will talk to them and understand their situation and take it from there."
He said some customers had experienced crossed lines, and would not be billed for the calls. Mobile phones and broadband services were not affected, but 111 emergency calls were.
