Xtra clients entitled to refund says watchdog

Xtra should offer disgruntled customers a refund after interrupted service over four days, consumer watchdog David Russell says.

The Herald received more angry emails from unhappy subscribers yesterday after the Telecom subsidiary, the country's biggest internet provider, supplied interrupted web or email services for the fourth day in a row.

Angry customers accused the company of failing to communicate its problems.

A typical email from Steve Simms asked why Sky TV could compensate him for 12 hours of outage this year but Xtra wouldn't.

"Why can't Telecom follow simple consumer guidelines?

"They happily give credits to business customers who are inconvenienced. Are residential customers second-class citizens?"

John Gibbons-Davies said some customers lost email service as early as 10am on Sunday, although Xtra only acknowledged problems from Sunday evening.

"Telecom needs to start treating their customers with some sort of respect and not just a source of income," he wrote.

Yesterday Telecom said it deeply regretted outages over the past few days and that normal service resumed last night to "most" customers.

Staff had worked round the clock to fix a series of problems that affected both email and web access since the weekend. Phones were still overloaded yesterday.

"We sincerely regret the inconvenience and frustration that has been caused to our customers over the past few days," said spokeswoman Kelly Moore.

But Mr Russell, director of the Consumers Institute, said that under the Consumer Guarantees Act Xtra should be offering customers compensation.

"If Xtra has any commercial nous, it will do its best to offer customers compensation. They have every right to be angry for the length of time the service was out."

The refund would be a percentage of the monthly bill and while payment plans for internet service could be quite complex, people were entitled to deduct an amount of money equivalent to the time they had no web or email access.

Xtra expected 2000 to 3000 customers would have experienced glitches last night because they would need to change settings on their computer for normal service.

Faulty lines

* Sunday: Email and connection problems caused by a fault in Telecom's power supply.

* Monday: 30 per cent of customers had problems with email for 10 minutes in the morning. Between 4.40pm and 10.30pm a faulty load balancer, which handles traffic, meant customers could not access websites and check emails.

* Yesterday: Customers had trouble getting online. This caused a snowball effect as modems repeatedly went through the automatic log-on process.

Telecom's advice

To restart a modem, turn it off, unplugging it from the wall and leave it disconnected for 30 seconds. Then plug back in and wait 5 minutes for it to reconnect.