[SINGAPORE] Singapore’s telecommunications regulator has imposed a S$1 million penalty on Singtel over a series of mobile service disruptions in March that affected around 720,000 consumer and business subscribers.
In a statement on Tuesday (Oct 20), the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) said that its investigations found the outages on Mar 16, 18 and 19 were preventable and within the telco’s control.
The penalty comes as Singtel’s Australian subsidiary Optus faces scrutiny over its own network reliability, following a string of outages that disrupted emergency calls.
In September, Optus apologised after a 76-minute outage affected calls to emergency services in parts of Australia.
IMDA found that the first Singtel disruption on Mar 16 was caused by a chiller system failure at one of its exchanges, which caused mobile network equipment to overheat and shut down.
The failure occurred after a Singtel vendor did not follow standard operating procedures to reopen a manual valve controlling water flow following scheduled maintenance. Singtel also lacked active monitoring of its manual valves and water flow to the chiller system.
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The subsequent outages on Mar 18 and 19 occurred after 5G mobile traffic was redirected to another Singtel exchange following the initial disruption.
The increased traffic load, coupled with a disabled network packet optimiser and a software bug at the second exchange, resulted in intermittent connectivity for some subscribers during the evenings of both days.
IMDA said the incidents could have been prevented had Singtel implemented more robust systems to monitor its chiller operations and ensured that the second exchange could handle the additional traffic.
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The regulator also ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of disruptions.
In determining the penalty, IMDA considered the “significant” scale and impact of the outages, while taking into account Singtel’s “full cooperation” with investigations and its efforts to progressively restore services.
Singtel restored 4G services first, followed by the progressive restoration of 5G connectivity. The telco also offered goodwill rebates of S$5 to S$10 to affected subscribers, amounting to about S$8 million in payouts to consumer and business customers.
The telco has since strengthened maintenance procedures and monitoring of its chiller systems, rectified issues at the second exchange, and conducted exercises to improve its network failover capabilities.
The regulator said that it “will not hesitate to take strong action under the Telecommunications Act, including imposing financial penalties, should any lapses be identified”.
“IMDA holds telcos, which are key service providers, to a high level of service reliability,” it added.
“These service providers are required to plan, design and operate resilient networks, and put in place measures to ensure speedy recovery with minimal inconvenience to end users in the event of a disruption.”