Business organisations in Dublin are to seek reassurances from Eircom that the systems failure which led to large parts of the city being without a phone service last Friday afternoon will not happen again.
Most critical of Eircom is the Dublin City Centre Business Association, whose spokesman likened the failure to recent scares about the continuance of electricity supplies. "It comes in a week when serious worries about our capacity to maintain the Celtic Tiger have been expressed," said spokesman Mr Brian Gough.
Mr Gough said his organisation would be seeking reassurances from Eircom that the failure was not due to capacity, but he also said the company should not "brush it away as a glitch, one of those things".
"From an international point of view, this looks bad. Will it happen again? What steps are being taken to ensure that it won't? We need to be told," he said.
The chief executive of the Chambers of Commerce of Ireland, Mr Simon Nugent, said his organisation's attitude could be described as "understanding but anxious".
"While there is obviously a cost to business, in fairness to Eircom they have a pretty good track record. This is the first time that there has been an outage in living memory."
Mr Nugent pointed out that some of the most advanced countries in the world experienced communications difficulties and he claimed that Chicago's phone system "went down" three times in three weeks recently. He also said that regions of Spain have been left for as long as eight days without a phone service.
But, while supportive of Eircom, Mr Nugent said his organisation would be meeting the company in the coming weeks to seek assurances that the crash cannot recur.
"We will be having a dialogue with Eircom to seek these reassurances. A lot of important Friday evening work will have been deferred to Monday morning and we don't want that to happen again. We want to address issues like the development of the country as an e-commerce hub and this type of thing is bloody inconvenient." Meanwhile, Eircom described the failure as "bizarre and unprecedented" but also said it was "over-criticised".
A spokesman, Mr Gerry O'Sullivan, said that while problems were routinely dealt with, a bizarre set of circumstances led to last Friday's failure. He said he would not play down the serious effect of the crash on business in the centre of Dublin but some of the media reports of infrastructural difficulties may have been overstated.
According to Mr O'Sullivan, the central problems were of a software failure and flooding at Hely buildings, the Eircell equipment centre, rather than network capacity.
He said the crash was "unprecedented" and as such "some reaction was not appropriate". Suggestions that the State's telecommunications were not reliable were incorrect. It was a digital system and one which had not crashed in this way before, he stressed.
While Esat Digifone states that its system did not go down, many customers experienced inability to make calls as capacity on the network reached 60,000 calls per hour.
