Two recent pieces of interest in the NZ Herald. Fran O’Sullivan’s piece yesterday titled: Failures make us look third world. About, yes you’ve guessed it, Telecom’s XT network failures and Transpower’s outage in Auckland.
She’s concerned that these outages were:
to put it kindly, more like what you might expect to occur in South America or parts of Southeast Asia
and then says:
Infrastructure failures do occur. But in Telecom’s case the excuses tendered by chief executive Paul Reynolds (who either doesn’t know what caused the failures or is simply using confusion to obfuscate what critics claim is the failure to scale up the XT network fast enough to meet escalating demand) verge on a Monty Python skit.
The absurdity of Transpower needing to call in police assistance to protect its workers when they went on to an irate farmer’s land to fix the electricity transmission company’s pylon was also bizarre.
Both these failures exposed the fragility of some of the nation’s critical infrastructure: Telecom does not have a back-up network for its XT service which will automatically kick in when failures occur.
And she hopes that the Govt’s national infrastructure plan will address the issues. But is concerned that it won’t go far enough. And I agree.
The second piece just updated on the Herald website is somewhat horrifying.
Telecom is giving out rival 2degrees’ services to key hospital staff on XT as backup in case the network, which has failed four times since December, goes down.
The Herald reports that this is what’s happening in the Canterbury DHB. Otago Southland DHB is reviewing its contract with Telecom and in the Hutt Valley, north of Wellington, Telecom began transferring clinical hospital staff to a reliable network after four outages that could have jeopardised emergency responses.
Capital and Coast, Blenheim’s Wairau Hospital and Hawkes Bay DHBs have either moved to pagers or are reassessing their contracts with Telecom.
So tell me that a functioning mobile network is not critical infrastructure?
Agreed.
I saw that on the news tonight. I think that something needs to be done and done fast.
I’m glad I’m not with XT.
Big contracts going south, is this the action that makes large company listen to the little guys rhetoric?
Telecommunications was always critical infrastructure. The 4th Labour government bastardised what we had and then sold it.
What plans do Labour have to bring it back into working order where the people have democratic accountability of this critical infrastructure?
Draco – Point taken, at the moment more crucial is what are National’s plans in this regard.
Electricity generation, telcoms, transport…
All are too small a market in NZ to have true competition and therefore should be publicly owned…