Wellington, May 7 NZPA - The New Zealand head of French technology company Alcatel-Lucent says an independent report on the problems with Telecom's XT network shows the right steps have been taken to improve the network.

The review, by British firm Analysys Mason, found Telecom's new XT network struggled because it was not ready to manage the levels of traffic it experienced.

The new generation XT technology was launched in May last year but failed a number of times over summer, with many customers without service for some days.

Telecom offered affected customers $5 million in compensation for the problems, and has since added 27 new mobile sites and 115 tower mounted amplifiers. The amplifiers were being added at the rate of 30 a week to bring the network up to capacity.

Alcatel-Lucent New Zealand and Pacific Islands chief executive Jyoti Mahurkar-Thombre, whose company built the network, said she was pleased with progress.

More equipment had increased its capacity to handle future growth and it had been modified, she said.

"The report provides an independent validation that the steps we have taken to improve the XT network are the right ones," she said.

Telecom chief executive Paul Reynolds said the review has been both chastening and heartening at the same time.

"Clearly some serious errors were made but the report shows that XT is fundamentally sound, that Telecom, and our partner Alcatel Lucent are now on the right track. Significant progress in improving the robustness and reliability of XT has been made."

The report said that despite being within Telecom's traffic forecasts, the rate of customer acquisition was too fast for the network in the early stages of its deployment.

This created a number of compounding issues that contributed to the reliability and performance issues experienced and the partial network outages.

"The fundamental problem was that the network and its operational processes were not able to adapt quickly enough during our ambitious launch programme; we acknowledge this and accept the findings of the report," Dr Reynolds said.

Together Telecom and Alcatel-Lucent had already completed an extensive programme of improvements and the network was now performing well, he said.

The reported identified a number of problems:

- The network failed because the network and supporting operations were not ready to manage the levels of traffic it experienced;

- Software issues contributed to network instability;

- Although the XT network was designed to initially provide planned coverage that matched the CDMA network the initial configuration of the XT network and, some network build issues, led to coverage variability;

- Some aspects of the network architecture are overly complex meaning that any faults are difficult to find and rectify;

- Immature operational management systems and process failures contributed to the impact of network issues.