Three days of internet failures compound Telecom's woes

Telecom's internet arm Xtra added to the company's troubles yesterday as some customers were unable to get email or access the web for the third day in a row.

Subscribers swamped the phone helpline with calls at the weekend and yesterday and say Xtra, the biggest internet provider in the country with around 600,000 customers, failed to let people know what was going on.

"It's just a question of communicating with customers and apologising for the inconvenience," said Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology lecturer Brian Pauling, who was able to access Xtra's site intermittently but saw no acknowledgement on its website of the problems.

"We do get treated with a certain amount of contempt."

Longtime customer Ron Beck of Epsom in Auckland thought the company should offer refunds. "They should make some sort of compensation because I am paying for a service I'm not getting."

The problems were fixed late yesterday afternoon but Xtra spokesman Sean Martin said some ongoing glitches were expected as a backlog of subscribers was cleared.

Problems began on Sunday about 5pm with an equipment failure which was fixed by 10.15pm, but the network crashed again on Monday evening and yesterday, with customers unable to log on because of "authenticity" problems.

The run of bad luck had technicians searching for a hacker but that was eventually ruled out, Mr Martin said.

Customers had problems at different times accessing either the web or email or both and not all were affected. He said Xtra acknowledged the inconvenience but did not do refunds.

"There's no credit policy as such."