Wharf New T&T has finally explained why Lai See 's phone line wasn't working during Typhoon Hagupit on September 11 this year - it was all because of poor planning and lack of investment by its main fixed-network competitor, PCCW.
New T&T's customers apparently suffered 'little or no congestion', while PCCW customers' telephones were largely reduced to office ornaments.
'As for customers of PCCW, we believe inadequate processing power to meet the sudden surge in calls, rather than inadequate physical connections to the customers, was more likely to have brought down PCCW's service for hours on the day of the typhoon,' the Wharf group firm claimed yesterday.
'By and large, there is today no shortage of physical connections to a customer's home. The public has been misled to believe otherwise. The typhoon clearly demonstrated that fixed network investment is most needed not at the customer end but at the operator end, ie, more capacity to process more calls.'
Of course, NT&T would (and often does) say such mean things about its main competitor. Still, one major lesson from the typhonic telephone meltdown: don't expect Hong Kong's communication network to function when millions of customers use it at the same time. Such as during, dare we say it, a major public disaster.
Tricky sums: Reader Cliff Bury, who uses PCCW's Netvigator service, received an e-mail scam request which has him wondering, among other things, how the scam artist got hold of his e-mail address. The e-mail claims to be from a manager with the Africa Development Bank.
'IN my deoartment we discovered an abandodned sum of US$10 million in an account that belong to one of our foreign customer who died along with his entire family in a plane crash in november 1998.'
