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Sunday, November 20, 2011

M1 fined S$300,000 for mobile service disruption, intends to appeal

From iTODAY:June Yang | 14 Nov, 2011 6:22 PM




SINGAPORE - The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) has fined M1 S$300,000 for the service disruption on 18 May which caused subscribers in the western part of Singapore to experience difficulty in making and receiving calls.

Subscribers also had difficulty accessing SMS, MMS and mobile data services via mobile phones.

IDA said it has investigated the disruption and found that M1 had not fulfilled its obligation to provide resilient mobile telephone services.

The service disruption was caused by faulty hardware cards in M1's back-end systems.

This affected the normal functioning of a database in M1's network that is used to identify and update the location of M1 subscribers at the western part of Singapore.

The service disruption affected more than 5 per cent of M1's base stations.

Due to the unique nature of the service incident, no alarms were triggered in M1's monitoring system, which affected M1's initial efforts in identifying and isolating the cause of the service disruption.

IDA noted that the fault that caused the service disruption was not foreseeable and not within M1's control and that M1 needed time to identify and restore service.

But it said it deemed that M1's efforts to restore the services expeditiously were not satisfactory.

In making its decision, IDA had considered the prolonged delay in isolating and identifying the fault, and to restore services, and also considered mitigating factors such as M1's efforts to compensate end-users.

M1, however, disagreed with IDA's conclusion, saying that the service disruption was not significant enough to warrant the fine.

In a press statement released today, M1 said, "M1 is fully committed to providing uninterrupted mobile services to our customers at all times and regrets any inconvenience caused. The mobile service disruption is of utmost concern to us and we have taken steps to further enhance our network systems and processes.

"However, M1 disagrees with IDA's enforcement action, and the basis on which the fine was imposed. We do not agree with IDA's determination that M1 had crossed the impact threshold of 5% of base stations under the Code, especially since none of our base stations were down.

"It was an isolated case and M1 had taken all the necessary course of actions to restore services to end users. As the problem was intermittent, the trouble shooting process was prolonged."

M1 says it intends to appeal the results of IDA's decision.


- Ref:itoday-Posted using BlogPress from my 4GiPhone

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