Vodafone moves in

The Herald reports:

Vodafone will today announce a fresh offensive to capitalise on Telecom’s ongoing woes.

Paul Brislen, Vodafone spokesman, said the company would refund any Telecom customers penalised for switching mobile phone providers.

Under the deal to be announced this morning, angry Telecom customers can change to Vodafone and keep the same phone number – and be credited the amount they are charged for breaking their contract.

That amount varies but in one case, Mr Brislen said, a customer had to pay $1500 to leave Telecom.

The aggressive attempt to snatch business and consumer customers comes as Telecom faced more problems yesterday.

The cost of these outages to Telecom must be well into the tens of millions of dollars when you consider the compensation, the lost customers, the scaring off of future customers, the damage to Telecom’s reputation which may affect stuff such as the fibre to the home rollout etc etc.

I speculated on radio yesterday that while the focus for now is on fixing the faults, and not finger pointing, there must be a reasonable chance in the future of a law suit between Telecom and Alcatel-Lucent. Obviously it all depends on the contractual arrangements, but when companies lose so much money due to technical failures, there tend to be fallout.

How big could any lawsuit be? I don’t think one could rule out $100 million or so.