Alcatel-Lucent has gone into damage control over the repeated outages at the HSPA network it supplied to Telecom NZ.
Following the exit of local chief Steve Lowe earlier this week, CEO Ben Verwaayen went onto the airwaves to defend the company, but was unable to explain the failures.
Verwaayen told Radio New Zealand today: “There are way too many issues in the network and we have to fix them.”
He said fixing the network was the vendor’s “number one priority in the world."
“I’m going to make sure we get all the resources there to fix the problem,” he told RNZ.
A Telecom New Zealand spokesperson last week told the NZ Herald that the initial network problem was due to a “serious hardware failure.”
However, he said traffic surges resulting from users trying to get back on the network subsequently overloaded the system.
Paul Budde from Australian-based research firm Paul Budde Communications told RNZ that the situation was getting “very, very serious” for Telecom New Zealand.
“[The] credibility of the management is at stake,” he said, adding that the outages were the company’s “worse nightmare scenario.”
Budde believes that Telecom New Zealand’s damaged credibility could in turn weaken its chance of winning the next stage of the country’s fiber roll out project.