Southern Telecom XT network customers yesterday experienced a second evening of text-messaging problems, but Telecom does not believe the failures are linked to last month's much wider network outage.
Callers to the Otago Daily Times said text messages failed to send late yesterday after the system had worked earlier in the day, a repeat of problems experienced between 4pm and 11pm on Monday.
A Telecom spokesman said from 6pm yesterday, some XT customers may have experienced disruption which affected texts and, to a lesser extent, voice services.
"Telecom's technicians took urgent steps to minimise disruption to services and this appears to have alleviated most of the problem by 7.30pm," he said.
Telecom earlier yesterday advised "an unusual pattern" of text traffic in the lower South Island had disrupted customers between 4pm and 11pm on Monday; the same area hit the hardest by an outage from January 27 to 29.
One caller said if Telecom did not think the two problems were linked, its flagship network had a second problem.
Monday's intermittent fault is understood to have meant 20% of text messages failed to send on the first attempt.
The New Zealand Herald reported it had received complaints from disgruntled Telecom customers in Hastings, Wellington and Invercargill.
A Telecom spokesman said a large volume of text-messaging occurred on the XT network between 4pm and 11pm on Monday, which it should have been able to handle.
"There are peak periods for texting and other traffic, and we look to manage those.
"The issue [on Monday night] requires extra scrutiny from us."Texting was the service most affected, but some voice services were also disrupted.
Services were largely back to normal on Monday night and the system was described yesterday afternoon as "stable", although Telecom said a specialist customer support team had been put in place to help customers.
The spokesman said the company was investigating the cause.
Customers unable to send text messages were advised to reset their handsets.
Telecom spokesman Mark Watts said Monday's was not a major outage and should not be compared to the failure which affected calling, data, and SMS in January.
Otago Chamber of Commerce chief executive John Christie said businesses had expressed some frustration with the reliability of the network.
The $5 million compensation package offered for January's fault was reasonably fair, but Telecom still had to provide a reliable service.
"At the end of the day, they have got to have a convincing story to keep that business."
Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Ernie Newman said the problem was very different in scale to the previous outages, but any disruption that lasted for more than a few minutes should be considered major.
The fact Telecom could not identify the cause of the problem added to his concern.
"They haven't at any point said `We know what is wrong and we're fixing it' . . .
"It must start costing them customer numbers."
Senior Telecom managers met business and civic leaders in Dunedin this week to discuss, among other issues, dispersing the $250,000 in goodwill funding that was part of the compensation package.
A company spokeswoman said compensation to affected users recognised the effect of the January outage.
Telecom Retail chief executive Alan Gourdie and Gen-i chief executive Chris Quin had been meeting the worst-affected business customers.
Additional reporting: The New Zealand Herald
