Vodafone takes Telecom to courts over interference of new network

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Vodafone takes Telecom to courts over interference of new network

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#212315 4-May-2009 23:19

ultmobnz:
mattwnz: One thing I noticed on the TVNZ news, is that Vodafone are claiming that these problems could cause 111 calls not to get through, yet they have known of these problems since last year, which is over 6 months ago. Why haven't they disclosed this problem before, to warn their customers that there are problems? People’s lives have potentially been put at risk, because of VF not disclosing these problems earlier. I thought Vodafone had a duty of care to inform there customers if there are known problems that could have life threatening consequences, which they should have done over 6 months ago. I wonder how many people have tried to phone 111, and not been connected?

Now thats crap service, no 111 call guarantee... realistically when has any network guaranteed call connectivity all the time! But Vodafone should have done something sooner if this was an issue. it just suits them now to make Telecom look bad & them to look like the inocent party.

I think they are using the 111 call thing, to get additional publicity, as it invokes panic when people aren't able to make an emergency phone call, which is an essential service. But to sit on this potentially life threatening problem for over 6 months !!!

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walt12

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#212316 4-May-2009 23:24

From a quick read, but without the benefit of the correspondance that must have undoubtedly have taken placed between VF & TCM, I'd say that they have some sort of case. Clearly they need to prove actual harm and disruption to their business, internal statistics aside, correspondance with TCM would amount to acknowledgement on TCMs part that there was some sort of problem.

I wouldn't be surprised if the injunction was granted ... at least until TCM bite the bullet and modify their tx sites such that interference is mitigated to the satisfaction of the Court.

And I'm no techo, but surely people can see the difference between a commercial launch, with the volumes involved, and the base testing that would have taken place until now. A quite different scale of problem potentially for VF, hence the reason for the haste at the 11th hour.

mikman

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#212320 4-May-2009 23:39

Here is the legal test that will have to be met (from http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0004002)

Injunctions are best suited to situations where an award of damages would be an inadequate way of compensating an aggrieved person. The basic test used in determining whether to grant an injunction is as follows: has the plaintiff established a case worthy for trial; will damages be an adequate remedy; and could the plaintiff adequately compensate the defendant for loss suffered by the defendant if, at the end of the day, the plaintiff were wrong?

An adjunct to the above test is the "balance of convenience (or inconvenience)" test. A court must compare whether not granting the plaintiff an immediate remedy will so impair the plaintiff's rights that, by the time of final judgement, the plaintiff will have suffered irreparable harm less than or greater than the extent the defendant will be harmed if the injunction is granted.

The second piece is the thrust of VF's argument

ultmobnz

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#212321 4-May-2009 23:40

walt12: From a quick read, but without the benefit of the correspondance that must have undoubtedly have taken placed between VF & TCM, I'd say that they have some sort of case. Clearly they need to prove actual harm and disruption to their business, internal statistics aside, correspondance with TCM would amount to acknowledgement on TCMs part that there was some sort of problem.

I wouldn't be surprised if the injunction was granted ... at least until TCM bite the bullet and modify their tx sites such that interference is mitigated to the satisfaction of the Court.

And I'm no techo, but surely people can see the difference between a commercial launch, with the volumes involved, and the base testing that would have taken place until now. A quite different scale of problem potentially for VF, hence the reason for the haste at the 11th hour.

They have left it this late to take it to court, this would have been known about for some time, maybe they planned on doing this middle of the month before June so they would have had the same outcome before the intended launch?

Again if the faults are only occurring on 900mhz then there is some work to be done, but the customers I have talked to and have involvement with have complained about 2100mhz as well so Vodafone can not heap all of there service issues on this one issue.

revolushn

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#212324 4-May-2009 23:49

BarTender: but wouldn't one think that vodafone should have complained to the med/rsm and to Telecom directly.

....

Come on the network has been transmitting for some months now so you would think it would be in everyones interest to raise this a little sooner than a few weeks before launch.

....

Everyones? How would this be in Vodafones best interest?

caldazar

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#212326 4-May-2009 23:50

Again if the faults are only occurring on 900mhz then there is some work to be done, but the customers I have talked to and have involvement with have complained about 2100mhz as well so Vodafone can not heap all of there service issues on this one issue.

Most people don't even have 3G capable 900mhz handsets and have been experiencing the issues on the 2100mhz 3G network (e.g. Auckland CBD), which is why I think this whole case is a red herring.

I was going to stick with Vodafone for at least a few months after the XT network launch just to see how things went but now I am thinking to jump over on launch day.

scottjpalmer

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#212327 5-May-2009 00:08

simon14: Am i seeing things or did i just see Johnr on tv3 news saying how easy it would be to fix the interference issues?

No, that was Juha, another Geekzoner

w2krules

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#212351 5-May-2009 04:51

grant_k:
w2krules: The obvious question of course is why are Vodafone having interference issues when Telecom are not?

It's very simple:

- Telecom's Receive band is 835 to 845.8MHz

- Vodafone's Transmit band is 944.8MHz to 960MHz

The nearest frequencies between those two bands are 845.8MHz and 944.8MHz which are 11.7% apart.

Compare this with the 1.7% separation in the reverse situation (as explained in my post above), and you can see why the problem is so much more severe from the perspective of Vodafone's receivers, compared to Telecom's receivers.

I don't know what the MED's rationale was for allocating two frequency pairs to competing networks which so obviously have the potential to cause interference in one direction i.e. from Telecom to Vodafone. From an RF Engineering perspective, it seems like asking for trouble. No doubt there are good reasons why this was done, but as can be seen from the separation percentages above, there are equally good technical reasons why it is going to be quite a challenge to nail this issue.

Thanks; I read this quickly and didn't notice how close the bands were.

Next question - why didn't someone see this as a possible problem from Day One? Surely Telecom and Vodafone know which frequencies the other is using?

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sbiddle

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#212352 5-May-2009 06:47

grant_k:I don't know what the MED's rationale was for allocating two frequency pairs to competing networks which so obviously have the potential to cause interference in one direction i.e. from Telecom to Vodafone.

Quite possibly the fact that we are one of only two countries running both 800 and 900 networks and what were possibly sufficient guardbands between both both in the ASPS/TACS days are now insufficiant for modern digital technologies?

Telecom took a calculated risk running their WCDMA carrier so high, they possibly didn't have any choices in this due to their already heavily loaded CDMA network with multiple carriers on many sites.

The sticky situation here is that Telecom quite possibly *may be* within their licence requirements. You can't go causing interference however to an existing network (which there is technical proof to show).

In Australia Telstra don't run their Next G carriers anywhere near the 900Mhz GSM / WCDMA stuff because they have plenty of spectrum to use.

For those who have also mentioned that Vodafone shold just install filters - this is simply bad engineering. Interference should always be eliminated at the source where possible regardless of whether this is a cellphone network or something totally different such as a PC.

rck

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#212354 5-May-2009 07:35

Ok, I havent seen this posted here yet but I was looking at the TUANZ site and this blog post contains some of the communication between Telecom and Vodafone legal teams. It also includes the findings of the MED back in April 09...

steve98

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#212359 5-May-2009 07:48

Is anyone else starting to think that the piece on TV3 News a couple of weeks ago about the text message not being delivered for about a week and the general slowness of voicemail delivery etc on the Vodafone network was very coincidental timing in the light of this action? I thought it was an odd story at the time, as you can always find at any time *someone* who thinks their mobile service isn't up-to-scratch, however it's not really newsworthy unless the problem seems to be widespread but the story only focussed on one customer. If I'm not mistaken the lady at the heart of the story was a 3News employee, and I even remember Mike McRoberts saying in the intro to the story that they did a quick "ask around" of 3News staff to see how many others had experienced the same thing, which I thought was an odd thing to say at the time. Does anyone know if CanWest are a Vodafone customer? Makes me wonder if CanWest's Vodafone Account Manager managed to pull some strings and get a story aired to bring the issues to public attention and 'pave the way' to litigation?

sbiddle

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#212360 5-May-2009 07:50

The Telecom PDF from the TUANZ site gives some some very interesting reading.

exportgoldman

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#212361 5-May-2009 07:54

sbiddle: The Telecom PDF from the TUANZ site gives some some very interesting reading.

Just reading that now, very very interesting.

It looks like Telecom is already committed to installing filtering on all it's sites by the end of May anyways, so this issue will become mute two weeks after launch.

The really strange thing is the MED, which I assume to know something about networks, say it's Vodafone's GSM network experiencing interference, not their 3G network...

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mikman

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#212373 5-May-2009 08:42

exportgoldman:
sbiddle: The Telecom PDF from the TUANZ site gives some some very interesting reading.

Just reading that now, very very interesting.

It looks like Telecom is already committed to installing filtering on all it's sites by the end of May anyways, so this issue will become mute two weeks after launch.

The really strange thing is the MED, which I assume to know something about networks, say it's Vodafone's GSM network experiencing interference, not their 3G network...

This is all starting to make sense.

1. Telecom definitely are creating interference onto VF's GSM network (only one that it can interfere with).
2. MED are saying its within limits of its license and appears to be below the power floor of the RX band - this suggests that Telecom's argument is that VF have wound up the gain on their Masthead Amps. The Amps are important - they help minimise the number of antennas (through use of cross polarisation antennas and duplexers you can reduce the number of antennas but you take a link budget hit - you need a Masthead amp to compensate. More things in the chain, the more stuff can go wrong)
3. MED are reserving their rights around whether Telecom has complied with ITU-IRR.
4. A question still exists around whether the interference is lawful or not
5. MED *think* that Telecom is going to resolve this issue as of 9th April - my guess is that offer is off the table now

What is clear is that for whatever reason - and I think you can really get rid of the conspiracy ideas - VF has decided that it is unable to resolve this through mediation. If they know that this could be fixed by end of May then an injunction to delay 2 weeks is not a big deal.

What really screws the scrum on this is that VF submissions imply that all their customer base is using 900MHz GSM and that is where all the failure points are. That gives them the biggest number. The question a judge needs to ask is 'what is the materiality of this interference on the stats taking into account only the 900 MHz GSM customers'.

sbiddle

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#212375 5-May-2009 08:49

Great summary Miki. You should be a cellular engineer!

Maybe XT is also interferring with Snapper! :-)

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