SINGAPORE: M1’s service disruptions in February 2014 and October 2013 were due to software issues that were not within the telco’s control. Thus, in these incidents, the telco did not contravene the Code of Practice for Telecommunication Service Resiliency and a financial penalty was not warranted, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) said in a statement on Wednesday (Jan 7).
IDA’s investigations found that the February 2014 outage was caused by an unknown software bug in the mobile site switches, while the October 2013 disruption was due to an unknown software glitch, the authority said.
“IDA also looked at factors such as whether adequate testing was conducted and whether operators’ processes were in line with industry and international best practices,” the statement said. “In both instances, it was assessed that M1 had taken all reasonable measures to restore service as expeditiously as possible.”
The IDA did point out, however, that the telco’s public communications during the disruption should have been better managed.
“IDA had expressed its dissatisfaction on this to M1, and required them to improve its communications to consumers during service disruptions by providing early and regular updates and assistance to users,” according to the statement. “IDA has also imposed tighter regulatory requirements on operators to provide more timely updates to affected users during service outage incidents.”
The Oct 16, 2013 disruption occurred at around 3am after M1 upgraded its Radio Network Controller (RNC) at its Jurong Main Operation Centre, and may have impacted about 23,000 subscribers in Ang Mo Kio, Choa Chu Kang, Jurong, Yishun and Woodlands. The affected services - 2G and 3G voice and data services, and SMS - were fully restored on the same day at 9.15am.
Based on IDA's assessment, it concluded that M1 had "taken all reasonable measures" to test the RNC software upgrade before implementing it, and there was "no undue delay" to the service restoration.
The Feb 4, 2014 incident occurred at around 7am, and intermittently affected 2G and 3G voice and SMS, and 2G, 3G and 4G data services being served via one of the Operations Centres. Services were restored on the same day at 12.15pm.
IDA found that this incident was caused by an unknown software bug which M1 and its vendor had not previously encountered, and service was restored " in an expeditious manner".
The authority said that it would not hesitate to impose financial penalties on service providers that breach the Service Resiliency Code, adding that “this was the case when M1 was penalised S$1.5 million for the disruption of M1’s 2G and 3G mobile telephone services in January 2013, and when M1 was fined S$300,000 for the disruption to its mobile services in 2011”.
- CNA/xy