Vodafone renews offshoring contract
Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) has extended its contract with Nokia to run its mobile networks operations from India.
The company will also provide customer service management for Vodafone's paging and mobile services.
Vodafone originally outsourced its network management functions to Nokia in 2010. Since then it has not all been smooth sailing, with Vodafone suffering well-publicised service difficulties during 2011 and 2012 that earned it the nickname Vodafail.
Nothing to do with offshoring though, according to Nokia Networks head of Australia and New Zealand Ray Owen.
"[With mobile networks] it works,” Owen is quoted as saying. "There is no doubt there have been some issues and I will leave [Vodafone Australia] to comment on those issues.”
"But what I would want to point to is where we are at today, which is a fantastic network and the user experience of people on the network that we help provide … is fantastic."
Until the next major outage. The CWU continues to regard offshoring of network functions as a threat to network security and to service levels. It also obviously contributes to the hollowing out of the local technical workforce.
It is time Canberra seriously considered policies that would help reverse this trend and help both retain and develop skilled telecommunication work in Australia.
