Meridian Energy and New Zealand Aluminium Smelters (NZAS) – 79% owned by Rio Tinto - have shaken hands on a power bill dispute reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars.

NZAS has a low cost ‘take or pay' supply contract with Meridian for its Tiwai Point smelter. A transformer failure caused an outage in November 2008 that cut production – and power use – from the smelter for several months.

Yesterday, those who live north of the Bombay Hills got to feel a little of the XT pain so familiar to those live south of Taupo. 200 cellsites went haywire, causing dropped calls and delayed txts.

But, for Aucklanders, no sweetener will follow.

After Telecom’s second XT outage, in January, it announced a $5 million compensation package for customers south of Taupo.

[UPDATE: Vodafone says the problem was resolved around 6pm]

Vodafone managers are meeting this afternoon to discuss what a spokesman called a “mobile broadband issue”.

One Telecom insider helpfully described the situation as “the national data meltdown at Vodafone”.

In Auckland, your correspondent is having no issue with Vodafone mobile broadband, able to email and web surf at speed.

The first Telecom blood has been spilt over the XT outage saga.

The company has just announced that Frank Mount, its chief transformation officer, has resigned.

The industry veteran (pictured), who has spent most of his career in his native US, joined Telecom in June 2008, after holding a variety of chief technology officer (CTO) roles at major US and UK telcos.