Telecom 'took 45 minutes to tell police of 111 problems'

A software failure preventing South Auckland callers connecting to the 111 emergency telephone system in the early hours of this morning has sparked an inquiry by police and beleaguered operator, Telecom.

About 30 calls were missed in the failure, which lasted about two hours from 3.30am.

Police superintendent Andy McGregor said though he was not aware of the detail of those calls, no serious incidents were missed by police because of the fault.

"There's no doubt we were very lucky, " he told Radio New Zealand.

"The type of calls we do get at that time of the morning may be prowlers, disturbances, traffic-type incidents; they may be burglars, that may be suspicious people."

When people called the 111 number, they connected to a Telecom-operated call centre. They then requested which emergency service they wanted - police, fire or ambulance - and they would then be put through to them.

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"In this case... the people couldn't get through to the exchange and Telecom couldn't answer their calls."

Telecom was already under fire after the Monday failure of its mobile phone network XT , its fourth failure since its launch in May.

Company spokesman Mark Watts said the first alarm alerting call centre staff to a missed call went off at 3.57am.

The telephone operators then got back to all of the callers within minutes, he said.

"If you make a call and it doesn't connect with a 111 system, that sets off an alarm and we react to that as soon as we can," he said.

Why police were not immediately informed of the outage and what exactly failed in the system would investigated in coming weeks, he said. Telecom believed the issue was software-related.

"It worked as it should in the very rare occurrence of an intermittent outage - and that's what we saw today. Most of the time, in fact 99.999 percent of the time, calls go through."

Prime Minister John Key said today it was "crucially important" to find out what went wrong.

"At the end of the day, we're a first world country that needs a 111 system that works 24-7, 365 days of the year. Today it failed and that's unacceptable and we're going to find out what went wrong."

Earlier Communications Minister Steven Joyce said Telecom could face financial penalties over the failure.

Telecom has agreed to pay $15 million in compensation after its flagship XT cellphone network repeatedly failed.

Mr Joyce said the Government was also looking at a financial penalty under the Telecommunications Service Obligations (TSO) Deed which gave Telecom a down time on the 111 emergency telephone network of only two hours a year.

"But I would stress that it has yet to be established whether they haven't met the actual agreement made many years ago in terms of the reliability of that service and on what basis, so it is early days to make any suggestion about what might happen there," Mr Joyce said.

"It would be a financial penalty under the deed if there was to be a penalty."

 

 

 

 

 

Beleaguered Telecom bosses may face a bill from the Government after the 111 emergency telephone network failed in south Auckland for several hours today.

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Were you affected by the 111 system outage? Email editorial@stuff.co.nz

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Telecom has agreed to pay $15 million in compensation after its flagship XT cellphone network repeatedly failed and today the Government said it was looking at the possibility of a financial penalty over the failure of the 111 network.

About 30 emergency calls failed to get through after Telecom's exchange at Papatoetoe had problems around 3.30am today.

Telecom ordered an inquiry several hours later and Communications and Information Technology Minister Steven Joyce said the Government and emergency services would contribute to it.

Mr Joyce said the Government was also looking at a financial penalty under the Telecommunications Service Obligations (TSO) Deed which gave Telecom a down time on the 111 emergency telephone network of only two hours a year.

"But I would stress that it has yet to be established whether they haven't met the actual agreement made many years ago in terms of the reliability of that service and on what basis, so it is early days to make any suggestion about what might happen there," Mr Joyce said.

"It would be a financial penalty under the deed if there was to be a penalty."

He said the 111 network failure was "disappointing and concerning."

The Government was very interested to know why the system failed to automatically find an alternative switch.

"Particularly concerning about this one (failure) this morning is that my understanding is that these things happen from time to time and there are "fail safe" mechanisms to ensure that the systems switch over and switch around an issue.

"Of particularly interest to ministry officials is why this did not occur on this occasion."

Telecom was warned about how critical the 111 network was during discussions about repeated failures of the XT mobile network, Mr Joyce said.

Under the TSO deed Telecom had an obligation to get a percentage of calls through and meet pre-determined response times.

"You can never guarantee 100 percent but this is a first, we understand, to have an issue like this occur at the Telecom end of the system," Mr Joyce said.

Several hours after the incident police said they were disappointed Telecom took 45 minutes to tell them of the network failure.

The Police Northern Communications Centre learnt of the 111 call problems at 4.15am when a police officer tried to make a 111 call. When he could not get through, he called the communications centre on his radio. About the same time Telecom told police of the fault.

Mr Joyce said the delay in telling police of the network failure would also would be investigated.

TRACKING FAILED CALLS

Police were in the process of contacting approximately 20 people who attempted to phone them during the time of the 111 outage this morning, said Communications Centre National Manager, said Superintendent Andy McGregor.

"Our priority right now is to do all we can to get back to those people who couldn't get through, assess their situation and see if they still require police help.

"We'd also ask people who may not have been able to get through earlier to call us back and update us in their circumstances," he said.

Earlier, Inspector Karen Wilson from the police northern communications centre said police were not aware of serious consequences resulting from people unable to get through on the emergency number.

She said people had been telling police, who had arrived on callouts, they were having problems getting through on the 111 number.

It was a "vital service" that everyone should have access to, she said.

OUTAGE 'DISAPPOINTS'

This morning, Telecom's media relations manager Mark Watts told Radio New Zealand the company was disappointed about what happened.

"New Zealanders rely hugely on 111 emergency services calling and that's why Telecom has thrown everything it could at it this morning to put in the necessary diversions and to get it working for callers. And it is now."

The Government is considering regulations to ensure 111 calls get priority treatment.

Mr Watts said today's problems were "not a good look" following earlier issues with their XT mobile network.

The most recent outage happened on Monday for customers living south of Taupo.

During that occasion, one customer was unable to get through to the 111 service to report an assault on a man in Christchurch.

Telecom has spent millions of dollars compensating customers affected by the XT network problems.

- NZPA