TelstraClear's woes continue

7.00pm - By ADAM GIFFORD

TelstraClear's internet woes continued today when problems encountered during the replacement of a $1 million switch put some of its networks out of action for several hours.

TelstraClear network head Bill Clince said technicians took the system down at 3am to replace an Extreme Black Diamond switch which failed on Sunday.

"As we were bringing the network back up we identified a further problem with the network configuration," Clince said.

"That was rectified and we resumed services at 10.20am."

Iconz operations manager Sean Weekes said the outage affected not only the large number of internet service providers using the service but also customers of Telstra Clear's frame relay and Speedway fast data network services.

He said Iconz was not badly affected because it had reconfigured its systems after Sunday's five hour outage so that its Auckland and Wellington networks terminated on separate Telstra switches.

"We were able to reroute traffic," Weekes said.

However, both the Telstra Clear and Telecom networks were unusually slow yesterday.

Iprolink chief executive Mike Conner said his ISP is buying a back up connection to the internet from Telecom, but it was not in place to avoid yesterday's problems.

"We can't afford to have this happen. We have to build in that redundancy if Telstra can't do it for us," Conner said.