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SINGAPORE – Two telecommunications companies have been fined a total of $ 610,000 for causing interruptions in Internet service during the circuit interruption period that affected many Singaporeans working from home or attending an apprenticeship at home.
M1 was fined $ 400,000 for broadband service interruptions in May, while Starhub was fined $ 210,000 for similar interruptions in April.
Announcing this in a statement on Sunday (September 6), Infocomm’s Media Development Authority (IMDA) said that both telcos had violated the 2016 Code of Practice for the Resilience of Telecom Services.
“In determining the amount of the final penalty for each incident, IMDA took into consideration relevant factors such as duration, impact and customer service measures taken by operators to mitigate the impact,” IMDA said.
In the Starhub case, the authority said the outages occurred on April 15 when one of the telco’s employees made a configuration error during a planned network migration exercise.
IMDA found that the incident, which affected up to 250,000 people, could have been prevented if StarHub had better supervised its staff.
In deciding the $ 210,000 fine, IMDA had considered StarHub’s efforts to quickly restore services and its prompt communication and compensation to affected subscribers.
For M1, the authority said that a problem with a corrupt profile database in the gateway of the telecommunications company’s broadband network interrupted services for 23 hours from 7 a.m. on May 12 to 6 am on May 13.
[[nid:484689]]There was also a second M1 on May 13: A software failure occurred in the telecommunications company’s network equipment, affecting the routing of Internet traffic for some 20,000 subscribers for six hours.
In its investigations, IMDA said that the first incident occurred because the M1 provider and staff had not followed the prescribed procedures, but added that the telecommunications company could not have reasonably foreseen or prevented the second incident as it was the “first of your type “for said team.
Therefore, M1 had violated the regulations for the first incident and not the second, IMDA said. He added that when determining the fine of $ 400,000, the authority considered that the interruption lasted almost a full day, which caused significant inconvenience to the affected subscribers.
IMDA also took into account M1’s compensation efforts to affected subscribers after the incident.
The authority’s deputy executive director, Ms Aileen Chia, said she seriously considers any interruption of service in public telecommunications services, particularly during the period of interruption when most people were working and studying from home. She added that IMDA will take firm and decisive actions to safeguard the interests of its consumers.
“Operators must communicate any difficulties in service to their customers and rectify incidents quickly, and they must provide good service recovery measures to affected customers,” said Ms. Chia.
“We will continue working with the operators to strengthen the resilience of the network and improve communications with customers.”
This article was first published in The times of the strait. Permission is required for reproduction.
