A senior Gen-i executive has admitted that Telecom has broken the promise it made at the launch of the XT Network to deliver mobile coverage to 97% of the population.
“We said we’d deliver coverage to 97% of the population to match CDMA, we have not done that,” Joe Caccioppoli, Gen-i’s head of mobile told a TUANZ audience yesterday.
He was speaking at the TUANZ After 5s event, which was billed as an explanation about the four outages of the XT Network. But the outages aren’t the reason the company hasn’t delivered on providing XT mobile coverage 'where 97% of New Zealanders live and work'. The 97% claim was made based on modelling prior to launch, and it wasn’t until six months later that the company realised it had not made good on its promise.
“We modelled what we believed was a coverage similar to CDMA, we wouldn’t have taken that message to market if we didn’t,” Caccioppoli says. “The reality is you can only model so much.”
So why didn’t the coverage match up to the modelling? Alcatel Lucent chief technology officer Martin Sharrock, who was also at the presentation, explains.
“On day one as soon as you launch, a network’s coverage starts to reduce. The reason it starts to reduce is that as soon as you add load, the cells start to shrink and the coverage diameter starts to reduce,” he says.
“Customer acquisition on XT was excellent, up to 470,000 users from nothing, so it was an excellent customer acquisition. Every single night you’re optimising, you’re changing the cells, you’re moving antennas. It’s an active live animal, so immediately you’re moving to maintain where you are. Now ultimately it’s going to come down to what you do.”
TR asked what the coverage is today, but Sharrock was unable to give a definitive answer. “Could I give you the exact figure? No. I’d have to go and make a few phone calls to decide what it is today.”
However, Joe Caccioppoli says the company is taking steps to improve its coverage so that XT does match up to the 97% coverage it advertised at launch. There will be an additional 47 cellsites in place by the end of June and Tower Mounted Amplifiers will be installed on 423 cellsites to boost the receiving signal. Caccioppoli assured the audience that Telecom had the capital reserves to make the necessary investment. It’s understood these improvements will cost $130 million.
Telecom’s coverage maps on its website no longer tout the 97% coverage claim.
Meanwhile Vodafone is sticking by its claim to have 97% mobile coverage. TR emailed spokesperson Paul Brislen today to ask if Vodafone’s coverage is “97% of where New Zealanders work and play” and he replied “Yes”.
