we all pay to use the service, so they should compensate all those using thier service. they sent my daughter a txt message saying $20. will be credited to her account when she checked up on it they had only credited her $10. whats up telecom, when she rang to enquire about it they hang up on her get real telecom pay what you say your going to pay dont come up with excuses, we all pay big money to use this service

This compensation package is only for those customers south of Taupo right? What about everyone above Taupo?? What are they going to do for us???

To be fair, good to see telecom's working on compensation. but when i saw that donation to charity, i felt like i bought a crapy car from a dealer but the dealer promoise to fix the street lights for my area.

well, thanks very much for your donation. but get real telecom, network is your heart, customer is your blood. look after them

I take great pleasure in knowing that most of the people switching away from Telecom after this are pretty pathetic, unreasonable people. Good luck voda with your awesome new customers. Mwuahahahhaa.

youngsters need cellphones its how we roll... pretty simple we pay for a service and if that service is not delivered were entitled to compensation and were alowed to whinge because theyre promising something they cant deliver... xt's a joke i had my same number with telecom for 6 years.. but this xt rubbish put me off so ive gone vodafone now best decision of my life!!!!!

To EACH and every one of the "business" lost complainers....take a wee read of Marcus #165 comments. Here is one person who KNOWS how to run a business and guess what....? He had a contingency plan and lost no business...does not say much about the rest of the business owners. Marcus's last comment says it all

Fail to plan. Plan to Fail

Well done Marcus - you are the kind of person I would gladly do business with...

since when did NZ turn into a bunch of whingers and whiners, but everyone forgets about the real heroes from all of this, the engineers and techs that spent 3 long stressful days through meetings and meeting deadlines for the network, i know how this feels as i was one of the so called heroes that spent the 3 days of no sleep or anything to get the network back up and running properly, people dont actually quite understand how much hard work was put into it, and how hard it was to fix but thats another story, we got no extra compenstation for the work we did, or anything, and no thanks to any of you ungrateful peopel :(

@Marcus #165 - I totally agree. Anyone who relies on one thing for all their business is taking a risk, whether that thing is a cell phone, PC or paper-based organiser. If all my business contacts and appointments were in my two year old laptop, with no backups, and the hard drive failed, I wouldn't be calling HP demanding compensation.

Telecom didn't have resources in their network to get business back up and running quickly, and Mr. Small Businessman wants compensation for (potential) lost earnings. Well, where was YOUR backup plan, Mr Businessman?

All that said, I have a great deal of sympathy for cases like JoeMoe #113, missing such an important event. But I think you will find that emergency services don't rely on cell phone networks for communication.

Sam #168

Of course people can (and still do in parts of the world) survive without electricity.

Are you forgeting the big power failure in the lower South Island a year or two ago???? Some went without power for 3 or more weeks....but they survived.

This completely over the top "my life is over" reaction to 3 days without a cellphone is insane! The old fashion (but not so gimmicky, trendy and 'must have accessory') landline phones did not go down. Has everyone forgotten how to use a landline phone?

And Marcus #165 made an EXTREMELY valid comment to all those whinging business people.

I think the over the top reactions in here just over not being able to use a cellphone for 3 days says a lot more about our society than anything else.

It is not the point that 'we can survive with out cellphones' etc, the point is we are paying Telecom for a service and they are not providing! Move to Vodafone, it's the best move I ever made. =)