Have a look at this: http://discussions.tomtom.com/t5/News-and-announce
If you update your device and reset it, the GPS issues will go away
-Ditte
Whilst I totally agree that people shouldn't be abusing others etc, some of the posters on here are either wind-up-merchants or hardcore fanboys.
If every company and customer had the attitude "It's beyond our/their control, so oh well, nevermind" you'd be surprised that literally no product or service you have in the modern world would function most of the time.
Regarding compensation, what some customers on here are asking for is not unreasonable at all in my opinion. Try visiting your local supermarket and walk out with some goods without paying, see what happens. You'll probably find that you'll be liable for prosecution because you didn't pay for goods/services received. However in your world, people that pay for a new TomTom or LIVE subscription are not allowed to complain or ask for reimbursement when they haven't received services they've paid for?
I do work in the telecommunications industry within IT, I know for a fact that with the contracts we have with other carriers/ISP's/governments/companies we'd be paying out money for an outage with a length and severity such as this.
If TomTom have a similar contract, which they should, they'll be getting reimbursement, but I bet some of the people on here still think that shouldn't be passed onto the customers!
Ask yourself, would TomTom give you even 1 days worth of service if you hadn't paid for it, nope!
What about if you used the line "Sorry you haven't received my payment for LIVE subsription yet, it's beyond my control, it's my banks fault, they've had a fire at one of their offices". The answer would still be nope, we're not activating LIVE until we receive payment.
Like neilxfraser stated, there are some serious holes in every companies redundancy and resiliency solutions, I agree. But when they have impacts on this scale, companies should take a serious look and re-acrichtect their solutions.
I would say however that their are fundamental design and disaster recovery flaws at both Vodafone and TomTom. Looks like Vodafone have a single point of failure for their entire NL customer base, inadequate redundancy, inadequate DR, in fact its even more of a farce that the fire wasn't even at their building!
It looks like TomTom's flaw is in using NL sim cards in every GPS device instead of one for the customers home country, this causes a dependancy on communication from the users home country and NL, something which was an accident waiting to happen, theres so much more than can go wrong this way.
All this said, I'm one of their customers who has a newly purchased 1005, LIVE hasn't been working since I've had it, so I haven't used it yet, can't wait to see it up and running though!
