XT now 'playing up' in Taranaki

Long-suffering users of Telecom's mobile network were fuming at a fault in Taranaki yesterday – on the very day the communications firm was smoothing over last week's XT collapse.

And they were even more annoyed to hear that Telecom described the situation in Taranaki as phones merely "playing up". From 9.30 yesterday morning, XT callers throughout Taranaki discovered they were unable to make calls.

Telecom media representative Katherine Murphy told the Taranaki Daily News yesterday the matter was unrelated to last week's crash on XT.

"Occasionally a mobile site plays up and needs resetting and that's what has occurred today.

"This morning at about 9.30am we became aware that two sites in Taranaki were suffering from some service degradation.

"This means that customers connecting to those sites may have had to retry to make calls or may have experienced a drop call or dropped data session.

"Text messages should have been unaffected."

Mrs Murphy said network staff reset the two sites at about 11am.

"If customers are continuing to experience trouble they can reset their phone by removing the battery and SIM, waiting a minute and putting both items back in their device before turning it on," she suggested.

The latest issue came the same day as Telecom's chief executive Paul Reynolds was flying to Dunedin to reveal a $5 million compensation package for thousands of its XT customers nationwide after last week's network outage.

- © Fairfax NZ News