Our Network
The world standard for reliability of a telecommunications network is 99.999% and it is achieved by Telecom New Zealand.
Telecom works hard to provide your business with a reliable and secure communications network. In fact, our network is capable of handling millions of independent transactions at any one moment.
But to achieve the world standard of 99.999% reliability still means that for 0.001% of the time there may be a problem. As a result we have over 500 people nation-wide constantly working on trying to improve our network's reliability.
What happens if our network gets damaged?
As an example, circling Auckland is a network of cable handling millions of independent transactions at any one moment. Should our network get damaged it will usually heal itself. Should it get severely damaged it will automatically divert to a back up cable. Should that fail, technicians will divert traffic to other backup cables. Should power fail there are 84 backup generators. Should any of them fail, the rest will have charged close to 500 back up batteries. Should all of these fail there is a backup team of people trained to do whatever it takes to put together a purpose built temporary network - just for your business.
Network facts
- Since 1990 Telecom has invested $5.9 billion in the network. This year we are investing more than $600 million on maintaining and expanding the wire and mobile networks in New Zealand.
- Our core network includes the public switched telephone, ATM core data platform, intelligent and international networks.
- We know a common cause of outages is contractors digging up cables and that's why we have '0800 B4U DIG' our 'dig safe' cable location service. Each year we get 50,000 requests to go out to businesses and physically locate cables, and between 70-80,000 requests to send out plans of cable locations. That means less chance of cables being cut, so your business can operate without interruption.
There are enough risks in business today, without your communications being one of them.
Telecom It Works
