Two massive outages on the XT Network in two months have forced the Automobile Association to reassess its contract with Telecom.

“We are not happy about yet another outage and we are reviewing our commitment to an XT-only solution for our in-vehicle communication,” AA chief information officer Doug Wilson told Telecommunications Review.

“We run an emergency service and need reliable, fast communication to our service officers and contractors.”

The XT network was down south of Taupo from about 10.30am this morning. Services were not restored until after 2pm – despite Telecom tweeting that it was expected to be restored by 1pm.

Wilson says the AA was forced to rely on its existing Vodafone data connection to deliver the voice calls from its service trucks. Those trucks have been waiting for a hardware upgrade to switch over to the XT Network, but Wilson says that decision is now on hold as the AA re-thinks its communication strategy.

The AA receives 750,000 calls each year to its 0800 AA service line; 52% are from mobile phones. Wilson says it may be that voice is delivered via XT and data by Vodafone.

“It (the XT network) is not very reliable, this is the second time in two months,” he says. “It went down about 10.30am and it’s still not really properly up, the last email I had said that if it’s not working turn your phone off and on, it’s not very good.”

TUANZ chief executive Ernie Newman says he’s fielded several calls from major corporate users, deeply unhappy about the outage. Newman says businesses were prepared to be generous in December, but twice in two months is too much. In his view compensation won’t be enough, Telecom will have to give its corporate clients absolute assurance that an outage lasting several hours during a week day will never occur again.

Today Gen-i chief executive Chris Quin sent two emails to corporate clients today apologising the updates – the first not sent until 2pm.

By 4pm Telecom had issued a press release in which Head of Retail Alan Gourdie apologised for the network outage.

“This level of reliability is far below what we and our customers expect – I can assure customers that this has the full attention of Telecom’s executive team,” he says.

The messages were too late for Wilson, who says his team had been following updates on Twitter.