Mr. Dermot Griffin:

We have put together a technical summary of the outages which outlines the causes. Some were related in terms of telecommunications issues but others were not. We also outlined the actions we have taken and the preventative steps we intend to take to ensure it will not happen again. The issue pertaining to Telefónica in Spain, which received extensive coverage and which required us to defer the draw, was a highly unusual event affecting 1,500 corporate customers around the world. It is highly unlikely to recur. Having said that, measures have already been put in place by Telefónica to build resilience against such problems. This system has been available 99.1% of the time.

There was a Meteor outage arising from a problem on the Meteor network. Approximately 800 sites were on the Meteor network at that stage. The roaming solution allowed us to move these sites from the Meteor network to other networks. We were successful in doing that but there are lessons from the outage in the sense that we can improve the time it takes us to move from a network that has gone down to a new network. We have put in an additional feature whereby the lottery terminal will send a signal every three minutes to confirm that it is connected to the host system. If it finds it is not connected it will automatically switch to another network. This means that if one network goes down we can switch quickly to other mobile networks to reestablish the service. Even under the old system we needed to continually test back-up facilities and resilience. We will continue to do that.