Editorial: Reputation on the line

OPINION: Hopefully it will be back up by the time you read this but as these first words of this editorial are written, a significant milestone has just passed.

Fifty hours since Telecom's XT network went down late on Wednesday morning, affecting thousands of subscribers south of Taupo.

Of course, many of those people had their service restored on Wednesday and others on Thursday. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests the network was active in Geraldine on Wednesday afternoon and by Thursday evening XT users in Temuka were able to use their mobile phones again.

But in Timaru, 50 hours came and went at 1pm yesterday with no indication that restoration of the service was imminent.

In one of the teaser television advertisements, featuring popular Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, that led up to the launch of the XT network last year, Hammond talks about the cars, boats and aircraft he has test-driven then says he's about to test something "completely new", a reference to the XT mobile network.

"It's faster in more places and it's more powerful than ever before..." he says. The ad ends with him turning to the camera, cellphone in hand, and declaring: "I can't wait to put them to the test".

If any Telecom executives have seen that ad this week, in the course of the mad dash to get the network up and running again, they must have cringed at the horrible irony those words now carry.

Put simply, the company's reputation has taken a hit. The network has been put to the test and been found wanting and everyone is in damage control mode.

Exactly what the reasons are for the outage will not mean much to customers, who will undoubtedly take the view that such potential problems should have been foreseen and guarded against before the network was rolled out.

That may be an unreasonable view, given that this is new technology, but there's no doubt that the outage has seriously inconvenienced many people.

To his credit, highly paid Telecom chief executive Paul Reynolds has been as upfront as possible in a situation that must cause him, as the man at the helm, immense embarrassment. He has said he is "livid" and acknowledged, as he had to, that much of the impact of this unfortunate situation has been to the reputation of his company. He'll really be earning the big bucks he's on over the next days and weeks.

Telecom responded decisively and appropriately to the previous XT outage last month. How it bounces back from this one, once the network is properly restored, will have a big impact on how well the company's reputation recovers.

- © Fairfax NZ News