Xtra says sorry, here's $3.25

Telecom's Xtra internet network is working again after spluttering for days, but customers say its goodwill offer of compensation - $3.25 for the average customer - is laughable.

"$3.25 won't even buy you a goodwill pack of corn flakes," said one affected broadband subscriber, who did not want to be named.

"We rely heavily on the internet at home for a variety of reasons and unfortunately it came at a time when we needed the internet the most."

Xtra business customers will be uneasy at Telecom's decision not to factor in potential business losses due to the outages, unless those businesses had signed up for special service guarantees.

The compensation offer comes after a series of problems that lead to multiple outages from Sunday until late on Tuesday. Residential and business customers will be compensated according to the cost of four days on their Xtra plan - the more costly the plan, the more they will receive. The average compensation is expected to be just $3.25.

Outages started on Sunday afternoon with a power supply fault, causing email and connection problems. About 30 per cent of Xtra users had further problems on Monday morning.

Later on Monday, a faulty load balancer, which handles internet traffic, meant customers could not access websites or check emails for about six hours from 4.40pm.

Then from Tuesday morning until 10.15pm that night, customers had trouble logging-on when Xtra servers became overloaded.

Telecom spokesman Sean Martin said Telecom servers could cope with all Xtra customers, "but not when everyone tries to log-on concurrently". That lead to several authentication requests, often from the same user.

He said upgrades to increase servers' capacity would take place through the "normal course of events".

All Xtra services were restored by 12.45pm on Wednesday. Mr Martin said while internet outages occurred from time to time, the latest problems were beyond reasonable. "Internet service providers can't guarantee a continuous un-interrupted service. But given the extended nature of these problems, we feel that a goodwill gesture is the right thing to do by customers."

Telecom will notify customers about compensation next week.