Another corporate revisits XT migration

In December they gave XT another chance, in February they are less forgiving.

Fonterra is the second major corporate to revisit an earlier decision to implement a full migration to Telecom's XT Network. A spokesperson has confirmed to Telecommunications Review news reports that the dairy giant has put on hold a planned migration from Vodafone and Telecom’s CDMA network over to XT.

“We are planning to resume the migration once we’ve got information from Telecom about what the root cause is of the outage, but the decision to put it on hold is a joint decision between Gen-i and Fonterra.”

She says the company is keen to find out from Telecom the cause of the two XT Network outages in December and January, after which its expected Fonterra will continue the migration to XT when it has “made an assessment on business risk.”

There are around 3000 mobile users at Fonterra, and to date 870 have been migrated over to XT. Traditionally the organisation has split its mobile contract between Vodafone and Telecom and CIO Chris Barendregt told TR last year that their target was a 95% migration to the XT Network.

“We’ve got a set of performance criteria that the network has to meet before we’ll encourage users to move across. So if they’re on an old Telecom network now and the new one just doesn’t cut it, we’re not going to say you must go across; you just do whatever’s got the best service for you.”

Fonterra’s move to put XT on ice follows a decision by the Automobile Association to reconsider the network as a total mobility solution. AA CIO Doug Wilson confirmed to TR today that it is revisiting an earlier decision to put all its business with Telecom. “We are using the event to debate whether we should have a two-supplier policy and reduce our single point of failure concerns in the vehicles.”

Both companies were wooed by Gen-i with deals that provided considerable benefits. Barendregt told TR in its November edition that there were significant savings in switching to the XT Network. And the AA’s subsidiary GeoSmart has had Telecom funding a free text alert service for all Telecom users for four months.

When questioned by TR following the first XT outage in December, Wilson and Barendredgt said they were prepared to give the fledgling network another chance and that it hadn’t caused them to change their mind about switching over to XT. See the article “XT Back, but will business forgive?”