Better get ready, anything IS possible.

What would you do if your nearly new, state of the art GSM HSPA nationwide network stopped running? And what would you do if a week after you still had no idea what caused it? When officials of Telecom New Zealand’s XT network find out they may be in serious demand worldwide as disaster management consultants. That is if they work out what actually happened.

This is not a scenario you hear about very often these days. Of course, networks fail during time of national disaster as we saw in Haiti recently, but restoring them is manageable. When a network stops running and for no apparent reason, the task of restoring the network and customer confidence can be a much more daunting task.

This extraordinary situation occurred last Wednesday when Telecom's XT customers south of the North Island town Taupo, including the capital Wellington and the entire South Island, lost connectivity on Wednesday at around 10.30am. Two days later of the 54 cell sites affected by the outage, 39 mainly in the south of the country were yet to be restored.

A spokesman stated that the transport links to affected cell sites had ceased working and added that the problem was hardware related and that Telecom NZ was working on determining the root cause of the problem. Telecom NZ also operates the nation’s fixed-line network.

One problem that's making the restoration process longer is the flood of simultaneous registrations that occurs when handsets and devices announce themselves to the network as service becomes available at each cell.

In order to combat the public relations nightmare this event created, Telecom NZ was forced to lend some customers CDMA handsets still operating on its other network, just so they could make calls. Corporate customers left in the dark for three days were offered four weeks of charges waived as compensation. Those whose service was only "degraded" on Wednesday last week would get two weeks of plan charges free. Consumers were also compensated. Postpaid customers out for the full three days offered two weeks free service, one week if they suffered a day of degraded service and three days, or $10 if they had poor service for just the Wednesday. A further NZ$250,000 will be donated to community projects in the hardest hit the lower South Island.

CEO, Paul Reynolds, moved to reassure customers that "all possible steps" were being taken to ensure the stability of the network. "We will leave no stone unturned as we commence the independent review of XT to ensure we are giving New Zealand the world class network it demands and deserves," he said.

Could this happen to your mobile network?  Do you have a business continuity plan in place to cope if it did?  It may be a very good time to revisit that plan and contingency for disaster recovery. It’s definite Telecom NZ will be.