StarHub fined S$50,000 for cable TV disruption

SINGAPORE — Starhub Cable Vision (SCV) has been slapped with a $50,000 fine for a cable television disruption that lasted nearly five hours on Sept 28, 2013, the Media Development Authority (MDA) said today.

The incident, which started at around 12.40am, is estimated to have affected some 170,000 SCV subscribers across various parts of Singapore. Those affected experienced a complete signal loss for both paid and free-to-air TV channels which are accessed through their SCV cable points.

Free-to-air TV channels were restored by 1.35am, while other channels were only fully restored by 5.30am.

MDA said in a statement that investigations showed the root cause of the service disruption was a power trip of a switchboard at SCV’s Ayer Rajah Headend, which supplied power to equipment used for transmitting cable TV signals.

“The disruption could have been prevented or made less severe if SCV had put in place effective contingency measures to deal with the power surge, such that the back-up system would not have been overloaded.”

As such, MDA found Starhub to be in contravention of its Quality of Service (QoS) licence condition, and after taking into consideration factors such as SCV’s service recovery actions, as well as the goodwill measures it subsequently extended to affected subscribers, MDA imposed a financial penalty of S$50,000.

MDA also noted that SCV has undertaken remedial actions to prevent a recurrence.