Mobile communications group, MTN SA on Thursday looked to attribute the blame for the recent Idols debacle on M-Net's wireless service provider, Grapevine Interactive.

Speaking at an MTN SA media briefing, managing director Tim Lowry said: "I am annoyed that M-Net has not come clean on this. I wish they would put out a press release saying that they accept full responsibility for Idols."

MTN said it informed Icasa that its network did not contribute to any delays in the receipt of Idols voting SMS messages.

"Idols traffic on 3 May was under 0.8 percent of the 40 411 921 SMS messages delivered," Lowry said.

"Grapevine did not add enough storage to facilitate Idols capacity and the ISP provided by them was not of sufficient quality to carry Idols' capacity."

Lowry also cleared up the matter regarding recent complaints of downtime on the MTN network. "We did experience signalling problems in one of our six nodes, which we have now isolated. It is our intention to discontinue that node and continue as normal going forward," he said.

Lowry also pointed out that MTN had informed Icasa about its status regarding dropped calls.

"There is a perception in South Africa that we charge for dropped calls. People have been trying to use exception to prove the rule. I would like to refute that," he said.

Lowry said that despite difficult conditions, MTN's dropped call rate was one percent against the international average of two percent. He said that key reasons for dropped calls were primarily as a result of Eskom power failures and Telkom link availability.

He added that bulk of MTN customers were on per-second billing.

"Some elements of network quality remain beyond MTN's control despite efforts to mitigate the risks. Self-provisioning is expected to mitigate some of these issues," Lowry said.

He pointed out that 53.11 percent of network faults were because of issues with Telkom, 1.81 percent were unproven, 7.25 percent of faults were MTN related, while all other faults were Eskom related issues.