Chorus has today said that, in partnership with its service companies, it is aiming to recruit another 250 technicians and support staff by the end of the year.

This is to help meet the demands it faces across its copper and fibre business, despite nearly 2000 people already being added to the workforce since 2011.

The announcement comes as the company apologises to customers who have been waiting too long for faults on its copper network to be repaired, and it has made improvement in this area its immediate priority.

During winter, when volumes of faults increase due to the weather, Chorus aims to keep average restoration times under 48 hours. A number of factors mean the average time to fix a fault has now increased to more than 60 hours, with some customers waiting considerably longer.

“We have had an unfortunate set of circumstances, including very wet weather and several major cable cuts by third parties, which has meant we’ve been playing catch up for the last couple of weeks,” said Ed Beattie, General Manager Infrastructure.

“Taking more than a day or two to fix faults is clearly unacceptable, both to ourselves and our customers. It’s not good enough and I apologise to customers who are frustrated waiting for a fix.

“When you’re short of people for all the work you need to do, it’s a constant balancing act, and we should have responded to longer fault timeframes sooner. We know we need to find enough technicians to handle these sorts of unusual events, and we are continually looking to add more skilled techs to the workforce.”

Over the last week, Chorus has reprioritised some of its technicians from other work and other locations, to fixing copper faults in Auckland, where the majority of the long lead times are to be found.

Since making a range of interventions to improve performance in this area, Chorus has seen the backlog of faults halve, and will publish regular updates on its fault restoration performance until it is back within business as usual performance levels.

Prior to the spate of wet weather and major cable cuts Chorus’ copper network reliability has been consistently good, with the overall volume of faults declining steadily over the last six years.

The company has also invested in improving its copper infrastructure, and high speed VDSL broadband is now available to around four out of every five lines.Workforce numbers the fundamental challenge

“The most fundamental challenge remains hiring enough people throughout the country to meet the demands of running an existing copper network, building a new fibre network and installing thousands of new fibre connections every month,” said Ed Beattie.

“The wider context is that across Chorus and our service company partners, we had about 1800 technicians working on the network in 2011, and today we have about 3700.

We still need hundreds more to be able to meet all of the demands on Chorus in acceptable timeframes. Not the least of which is doing more than 600 fibre installations every day – a huge level of demand.”

“At the same time, we are competing with the Christchurch rebuild, the Auckland housing demands and the NBN build in Australia for skilled technicians, and like all of those we are finding the potential labour pool to be too small to meet all of our needs.

“We have scoured New Zealand for potential technicians, and also brought in technicians from around the world to help meet the demand, but it’s still not enough. It’s not a matter of budgets or willingness, we simply need more people and the “help wanted” sign is well and truly out.

“We have left no stone unturned, including working with WINZ, running job fairs, hiring technicians from overseas, working with other companies who may no longer need as many technician staff, and working with Government to make hiring overseas workers with relevant skills easier.

“We run extensive training programmes, as do our service company partners, and we are adding around 25 new technicians to our field force every week.

“But the need to add technicians to the workforce must be balanced with ensuring they have the right skills to ensure high quality of workmanship, and the right customer service capabilities so we know they are providing a good experience for our customers when they go into their homes.

“We know this is a challenge across many sectors, and we remained focused on significantly improving performance as we find and train up ever increasing numbers of technicians,” he said.

Fault restoration performance month to date at 19 July 2016

- Total Chorus lines: 1,747,000 (as reported 15 April 2016)- Faults currently logged with Chorus: 22,851- Faults restored month to date: 22,437- Average time to restore: 60.1 hours- Currently open faults: 3,261- Faults open for more than three days: 1,074

A press release from Chorus