Disrupted 3G Service Sees SingTel Fined SGD$400,000

Here’s some interesting information that was sent to us by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) regarding a mobile service disruption that occurred in Singapore last year:

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) has imposed a financial penalty on SingTel Mobile Singapore Pte Ltd (STM) for breaching the Code of Practice for Telecommunication Service Resiliency (the “Service Resiliency Code”). This follows IDA’s investigation of the disruption of STM’s 3G mobile services on 6 and 7 September 2011, which found that STM had not fulfilled its obligation to provide resilient mobile telephone services under IDA’s Service Resiliency Code.

The service disruption caused some of STM’s mobile subscribers in the central region of Singapore, including Orchard, Tanglin, and Telok Blangah, to experience intermittent difficulties in making and receiving calls and accessing SMS, MMS and mobile data services via STM’s 3G network. […] Investigations showed that the service disruption was caused by a software glitch in the new switches that were progressively being installed by STM in the central region of Singapore to upgrade its network. The software glitch affected the normal routing of data packets in the network, and mobile services in the central area were intermittently disrupted over three periods between 6 and 7 September causing a total of 22 hours of service disruption. More than 5 per cent of STM’s base stations were affected.

And the fine is a hefty SGD $400,00 (US$312,000). Wow. But it does keep the 3G service standards high here. I have been using SingTel’s (ASX:SGT) service for a couple of years now. It’s been good, not perfect but good. You will love it when compared to the 3G services in a few surrounding countries (no offense intended).

The fine is an interesting mechanism, one that ensures that telcos do their best for the consumers. To our knowledge, there’s no such consumer protection measure in other mature mobile markets like Japan, where outages have been on the increase recently. IDA raised its minimum quality of service standards just a couple of months back on April 1.

Although the disruption was reported last year, this news was strangely timely — right after its recent acquisition of HungryGoWhere. Some Twitter users were commenting about the deal, stating the SGD$12 million spent on that acquisition could be better spent on improving mobile services. I found that pretty funny, but come on, everyone screws things up once in while, including the big boys. These tweets sum things up pretty well. Enjoy:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/contrabandkarma/status/204870606963998720″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/radhumandummy/status/204937342295879681″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/casandrafml/status/204955595185463297″]