The nation's leading telecoms carriers saw their fault repair efforts decline in the March quarter, a fact that both Telstra and Optus blame on the NSW bushfires and flooding that followed shortly after.

According to the latest Telecommunications Performance Monitoring Bulletin, released by the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) today, Telstra's national fault clearance performance for all areas (urban, rural and remote) declined by four percent to 87 percent. It declined in urban areas by five percent to 84 percent.

Of the incumbent carrier's declining fault clearance in urban areas, the ACA said: "Telstra's performance has declined for three consequtive quarters following the June 2001 high of 92 percent."

Despite decline in all areas, Telstra's performance remained "high and stable" in rural and remote areas, according to the ACA.

Optus' fault clearance performance declined by seven percent to 78 percent. This is the second consecutive quarter to see a fall, according to the ACA. Optus' fault clearance levels stood at 85 percent in the December quarter 2001 and 93 percent in the September quarter 2001.

-Telstra and Optus both attributed the decline in their March quarter performance to significant additional workloads and the inability to access infrastructure because of bushfires and flooding in New South Wales," according to ACA chairman, Tony Shaw.

The ACA is investigating Optus' performance against this indicator.

-Exemptions from the Customer Service Guarantee (CSG) were claimed by the carriers for these events but exemptions do not necessarily maintain performance levels. We've followed up with the carriers concerned and will be looking for an improvement in the performance trend in the June quarter," Shaw said.

The March quarter bulletin also revealed a decline in new service connections in urban areas for both Optus and Primus.

Optus' performance in providing new connections declined to 91.6 percent from 97.3 percent in the previous quarter.

Telstra's new connections improved three percent from the previous quarter to 93 percent.

In its Bulletin, the ACA's said call centre results showed that Telstra's performance was high, with 99 percent of all calls to Telstra'a directory assistance answered and 94 percent of those calls answered within 10 seconds. Forty-four percent of calls to AAPT's call centres were answered within 20 seconds. Optus answered 49 percent of calls within 20 seconds in the March 2002 quarter, up from 47 per cent in March 2001. Primus reported 32 percent of calls answered within 20 seconds.

Nationally, the availability of payphone services remained high and stable at 98 percent, according to the ACA.

The national incumbent chose to compare its quarterly results with the same period four years ago.

-Telstra has achieved the highest level of performance for telephone connections for any March quarter since 1998, with 93 percent of new telephone connections across the country completed on time," the telco said in a statement.

Managing director of Telstra Service, Michael Rocca, pointed out that fault repair in urban areas was the only area its service performance declined.

"Our performance in fixing faults in Urban areas is improving over time, improving by 20 percent since 1998," he said. "Our goal is to consistently achieve above 90 percent but this was prevented by the devastation of the NSW bushfires, requiring a national mobilisation in line with other utilities and emergency services."

"Immediately following the bushfires, NSW experienced the wettest February for 12 years causing a rise in fault related work 35 percent above our forecast. During the wettest period of the quarter demand for service was almost ten times above normal."

According to Rocca, the preliminary data for the current June quarter shows that the trend of improvement for urban areas as well as regional Australia was continuing.

A spokesperson for Optus said he hadn't seen the ACA report, but confirmed that a degradation in network performance was due to the bushfires and the storm damage.

He refused to comment on the ACA's investigation into its fault clearance performance other than to say: "it is my understanding that [the ACA] has accepted our explanation for that".

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