Telcos Defends Response After Tasman Mobile Outages

Friday, 4 July 2025, 3:56 pm
Article: Max Frethey - Local Democracy Reporter

After being criticised by the mayor and derided by locals, the Telecommunications Forum is defending the response to reception outages during Tasman’s storms.

Tasman was hammered by heavy rain on Thursday and Friday last week causing telecommunication outages for the town of Wakefield which were only fully restored by the end of the following Wednesday.

Mayor Tim King said the situation was an “epic cock-up” saying coverage should have been restored earlier, while Wakefield locals described the response as “hopeless”.

Paul Brislen, chief executive of the Telecommunications Forum, defended the response of telecommunication companies.

He said the mobile networks couldn’t be designed to have perfect coverage, especially during damaging weather events.

“I can understand it. It can be frustrating for people,” he said.

“In this instance, we had very few towers that were out of action, but I’m not sure if the issues on the network were communicated with the public in the area adequately.”

Brislen said providers’ first priority was to get emergency calls restored if coverage had been impacted.

As long as one provider’s network in an area was operational, customers of another service provider who had otherwise lost coverage would still be able to make calls to 111 because of the industry’s back-up protocols, even if they can’t make regular calls.

Once emergency connections were restored, providers would then focus on restoring their general networks.

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“We need power, we need backhaul, and we need connectivity to the customer, and then if any one of those three things breaks, you’ll be without comms. It’s always been that way, but for some reason recently, people seem to think that comms will always be available, and that’s just not the case,” Brislen said.

Weather events could also create accessibility issues for response teams who were trying to restore connections.

“It does take time to find and to repair, particularly when you’re trying to dig a hole in a flooded field. You can imagine that that is not the easiest of things to do, because every time you dig a hole, it fills up with water.”

People who were reliant on having a connection should ensure they have their own back-ups, such as batteries or a generator, Brislen said.

He added that satellite technology, which was “evolving quite rapidly” and didn’t rely on on-the-ground infrastructure, would increase network resilience during emergencies.

Golden Bay was also without coverage for most of Thursday after cables were damaged in two places affecting about 1150 connections and hampering emergency calls to 111.

Fibre-optic cables are plastic tubes with light travelling down their length, and breaks are first realised when the light doesn’t reach the other end.

“The plastic cable, in this case, is kilometres of length going over a hill, over a couple of bridges.”

In responding to those breaks, teams travelled the length of the cable and were unable to find an obvious sign of a break and so had to manually test each section until the breaks were found.

“There’s no fast way of doing that, and it gets even worse if there is a landslide or a slip,” Brislen said.

Separately, Spark said it had set up a temporary cell tower in Wakefield to provide connection to within the township during the earlier outage and deployed, for the first time outside a test environment, a small satellite-connected cell site to Murchison to restore connection.

2degrees said it understood the frustrations of those impacted by outages and that its teams had been working in challenging conditions to restore connection both quickly and safely.

The company was continuing to monitor the weather around the country, a spokesperson said.

One New Zealand said only one of its towers in Wakefield, a back-up, was impacted and so there were minimal impacts for its customers.

Chorus apologised to affected customers and said that its response brought in technicians from other areas to speed up recovery work in Golden Bay but added its priority was the safety of staff, contractors, and the public.

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