SingTel fined S$50,000 for fixed-line outage

SINGAPORE — SingTel has been fined S$50,000 for an outage that occurred last November.

According to the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) yesterday, a service difficulty incident occurred in SingTel’s fixed-line network, which caused some to experience disruptions on their fixed-line telephone services and data circuits.

Around 4,000 lines were affected in the more than two-and-a-half hour disruption.

The incident happened around 4.37pm on Nov 23, where SingTel detected alarms affecting five cabinets in the Ang Mo Kio area, said the IDA.

It was found they were triggered by a faulty optical card in the Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) equipment in one of the cabinets.

Full restoration was completed at approximately 7.14pm. Further investigations revealed there was also a fibre break in the standby fibre path of the SDH ring network, which resulted in service disruption.

The authority said SingTel would be in breach of the Code of Practice for Telecommunication Service Resiliency for any service difficulty incident that exceeds one hour and affects an aggregate of 500 or more local fixed telephone subscriber lines.

While it found that the cause of the faulty optical card of the SDH equipment was not in SingTel’s control, further investigations found the telco to be liable as the incident could have been avoided if it had carried out the fibre patching work correctly and followed standard operating procedures — to check that all alarms had been cleared — after the work was completed.

A SingTel spokesman said: “The incident was due to an isolated hardware fault and we have since taken steps to prevent it from happening again. We assure our customers that we continually strive towards the highest standards of reliability and performance for all our services.”