Vodafone NZ says broadband should be back-up after 'intermittent' national outage

Thursday, 26 March 2020

Some Vodafone customers have been cut off from broadband.

Vodafone NZ believes it has fixed a fault that caused a partial outage of its broadband services on the first day of the coronavirus lockdown.

Spokeswoman Nicky Preston said there had been an intermittent problem, but the company advised at 2.40pm that it believed that had been resolved.

The company said on its website that some customers nationwide might be experiencing a loss of data services on their broadband connections, in a status report published at 1.30pm.

One Auckland customer said they had been unable to access ultrafast broadband or mobile broadband, but had been able to make voice calls.

They said it appeared their service was restored shortly after 2pm.

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Another customer said they had been unable to connect to broadband since last night.

One Auckland customer said they had been unable to access ultrafast broadband or mobile broadband, but had been able to make voice calls.

Not all services were impacted, with Vodafone's cable network in Wellington working normally for at least some customers through the period.

Phone companies meanwhile appear to have resolved an 'industry-wide' issue that caused some mobile phone calls to fail earlier in the week.

The problem stemmed from a high volume of calls that caused congestion at the handover points between the three networks.

Spark spokeswoman Arwen Vant said the telcos had 'expanded the number of call routes' between the networks to help ease the congestion, which it also expected to die down 'as people adjust to working from home'.

Broadband companies including network company Chorus have been confident that their fixed-line broadband services would not experience any additional congestion during the lockdown, despite the numbers of people working and studying from home.

Chorus spokesman Nathan Beaumont said traffic on its network reached 1.99 terabits per second at noon on Thursday, which he said was double that of a week ago and up on 1.68Tbps from Wednesday, 'but comfortably within available headroom'.

Streaming television service Netflix has reduced the bit-rate of its service to lessen the risk of congestion during the evening traffic peaks.