Telecom NZ's problems attract police attention

Stuart Corner
Friday, 26 February 2010 14:46

IT Policy - Regulation

Telecom New Zealand, mired in seemingly intractable problems with its XT network, is now under police investigation for failing to deliver calls to emergency services.

According to communications minster, Stephen Joyce, a fault occurred at approximately 3:30am on 26 February in Telecom's Papatoetoe exchange that resulted in some emergency calls (to 111 in New Zealand) not connecting to an emergency services call centre.

"I spoke to Telecom CEO Paul Reynolds this morning and agreed that officials from both the Ministry of Economic Development and the Police will be involved in this investigation," Joyce said.

He added that and the Ministry would engage an independent technical expert "to ensure that Government is fully confident that all issues are identified."

"The investigation will seek to determine the root causes of this fault as well as why back-up and call diversion systems did not work as intended and [why they] were not put in place earlier. This includes whether the Police were informed in a timely manner that such a fault had occurred.

"The investigation will also ensure that all failed emergency 111 calls were followed up and received a call-back; and in cases were no answer was received, a Police patrol car dispatched to check whether a genuine emergency was taking place."

The day previously the minister had made his first indication that the Government might intervene in the problems with the XT cellular network that has suffered a number of major outages in recent week, focussing on reported failures to provide proper failover to another network during the failures.

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