New text message service suspended

11.00 am

Vodafone, which operates the 021 cellphone network, says it is suspending the service that enabled its customers to exchange text messages with users of Telecom's 025 system.

Vodafone says Telecom's gateway has been unable to cope with the volume of text messages flowing between the two networks.

Both companies had been heavily advertising the introduction of a message exchange function between their systems.

Sending SMS (short messaging services) text messages via mobile phones or "texting" has become an increasingly popular method of communication. An estimated 900,000 SMS messages are now sent within New Zealand every day.

"It's true we are having difficulty - the system has crashed several times all day – but we are trying to work through the solution," Vodafone spokeswoman Avon Adams said yesterday.

Ms Adams said the problem had affected "several thousand" messages sent from Vodafone customers to people on Telecom's digital mobile network. She believed it stemmed from a lack of capacity on Telecom's interconnect system with the Vodafone network.

"Telecom has made some attempts to redress this, they have doubled the system's original capacity, but they are still having problems," said Ms Adams.

"They can't receive enough messages from us and some of them are backing up on our network. They have no difficultly in sending their messages to us because we have plenty of capacity."

Telecom new Zealand spokeswoman Linda Sanders said messages had been delayed by a fault in some equipment "related to the internet gateway". She confirmed the problem had been occurring for several days but was unable to give further details.