Telecom New Zealand’s XT Mobile network, designed by Alcatel-Lucent, was not ready to cope with traffic requirements during its initial launch stage, according to Analysys Mason.
The UK-based firm has penned a nine-page report into the 3G network’s recent series of outages, finding that customer acquisition was too fast for the network to handle in the early stages of its deployment.
“The fundamental problem was that the network and its operational processes were not able to adapt quickly enough during our ambitious launch program,” said TNZ.
Analysys Mason also blamed “immature operational management systems” for the several outages that occurred on the network between December and February.
It also found some aspects of the network architecture to be “overly complex,” thus making it difficult to find and rectify faults.
“Clearly some serious errors were made but the report shows that XT is fundamentally sound,” said Paul Reynolds, TNZ’s chief executive officer.
Reynolds told the NZ Herald that many of the issues had been addressed, including the addition of two radio network controllers.
On Friday, TNZ announced that its net profit fell 17.7% year-on-year to NZ$340 million (€190.7 million) in the nine months to end-March due to the country’s economic slowdown.