New Zealand - Analysis of Telecoms Mobile Crisis

Synopsis

Four major outages of its new 3G mobile telecommunications network since it was launched in May 2009 – and by February 2010 no apparent end to the problems – give us a good reason to analyse this situation and to see if there are implications for other networks and other countries.

There certainly are lessons to be learned from this event.

The endemic problems being experienced on the Telecom mobile network could point to some serious planning and/or design faults. As the technology is fairly universal and Alcatel Lucent, the provider of the network, is a veteran in telecoms it is hard to believe that the reason for the fault is a simple one.

Also, looking at the broader and rather precarious situation in which Telecom finds itself, the finger may need to be pointed at a more fundamental issue.