Wellington, Feb 11 NZPA - Dairy cooperative Fonterra has postponed the transfer of staff onto Telecom's XT network in the wake of high-profile outages in December and January.

A Fonterra spokeswoman confirmed today -- on the eve of Telecom's release tomorrow of its first-half profit results -- that the upgrade to XT had been put on hold.

After the December outage, Fonterra chief information officer Chris Barendregt was reported to have said the cooperative was prepared to give the XT network another chance.

But the spokeswoman said today that in the wake of the three-day outage which began on January 27, Fonterra had put a freeze on its move of about 1500 users from Vodafone to XT.

She said the halt to the migration from the older CDMA and GSM cellular platforms to XT was a joint decision between Fonterra and Telecom's Gen-i arm.

"We don't expect it to be for very long," she told NZPA.

None of Fonterra's tankers had been switched from Vodafone GSM connections to XT, but 878 staff were caught up in the January outage, she said.

Fonterra is expected to resume the migration once it has information from Telecom about the root cause of the outages, and has made an assessment on business risk.

The Automobile Association has told the Telecommunicatons Review website that it is revisiting an earlier decision to put all its business with Telecom, and is considering whether to have a two-supplier policy.