Jason Paris: One NZ CEO on the new service designed to show mobile outages in real time

A new service has been launched that's designed to show mobile network outages in real time.

The service builds on the Hourua partnership between Spark and One NZ, and experts believe it'll be helpful for operations taking place during natural emergencies, such as cyclones.

One NZ CEO Jason Paris says this development means services will be able to be restored during emergencies much quicker.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now we have a new service that will show mobile

(00:02):
network outages in real time. One New Zealand and Spark
of joined forces to create the thing. It's believed to
be a world first and one New Zealand's chief executive,
Jason Paris is with us. Now, Hey, Jason A Heather right,
who uses this thing? Do I use this thing?

Speaker 2 (00:16):
No? You don't, but our emergency services do. So fire
an emergency service New Zealand Police, Saint John and Wellington
Free Ambulance initially, and then we want others to come
onto the service as well. And basic what it means
is we can prioritize them when there's congestion on our networks.
We can also make sure that they can roam off

(00:40):
each of our networks because no Spark has a different
coverage footprint to us. And then today we announce the
third service, which basically means we can give emergency services
advanced warning on any planned network outages or if we
have a natural disaster many network outages, so we can
optimize our network to save lives.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
So how would it work if you're planning to, I
don't know, take down a tower and fix it or something,
and it's going to create an outage. How would that
help an emergency service to know that in advance.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Well, it's just making sure that if they are in
a remote area that doesn't have coverage from both of us,
that they might need an alternative way of communicating for
an hour between say one and two in the morning,
because that's the most of the time when we do
kind of planned outages. It's not during the middle of
the day, but people get sacked or get themselves in

(01:30):
danger in a whole lot of bunch of different ways.
And it's just making sure that especially those emergency services
and the most remote and regional areas know where there's
a planned outage.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
And so is the same true of if there's a
major weather event and not any kind of natural disaster
knocks out coverage, then they know where they need to
take satellite phones or something into.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, exactly. Of course, you know, we've got satellite technology
available now which gives another level of resilience. But with
the networks on the ground get taken out, it means
that we can restore them where emergency services tell us
much much faster, so Spark and ourselves can kind of
share the load and stand up our networks in different

(02:14):
places at different times. When that network comes back on,
of course, lots of people want to connect to our
cell towers all at the same time. We will prioritize
emergency services first to make sure that they've got access,
and then you know, we make sure that we can
reciprocally roam roam off each other's networks, again, prioritizing the

(02:35):
emergency services over other traffic. Again, it's about saving lives.
Easy thing to do, so quite technically difficult. It's a
world first for a reason, I think technically difficult one.
And then two, you know corporates here that we don't
normally like sharing our toys in the sandpit, and so
spark and One New Zealand coming together to share infrastructure

(02:56):
it's a really good thing for New Zealand. You know,
modern digital infrast structure resilience means that people are safer
and in spark on One New Zealand working together is
a pretty good thing for the country.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Now, Jason, I've got to say, man, yeah, I know
you've been you've been censored on this, but some of
those REEFS calls throughout the past season have been dodgy
as all, how haven't they?

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Yeah, they have. I've been pretty frustrated. You know, even
on Saturday night, I thought there was a clear knock
on and a clear forward pass. But either if you
talk to the team, we still haven't been playing to
our full potential for eighty minutes. So I've reluctantly got
to admit that we should be taking the reef's decisions
or the bunker's decision. More importantly, it's really hard for

(03:41):
the rest on the field, and it's going so quickly
out of out of their hands, and by winning by
ten or twenty instead of winning by six points or
losing by six points. So twenty twenty six Premiership here
we come. Once we meet our full potential.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
I love the enthusias, love the belief. Thank you, Jason
Jason Parris, chief executive of One New Zealand.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
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Speaker 1 (04:07):
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