SingTel's slapped with $220,000 penalty for island-wide MioTV service disruption

The incident affected 26,000 subscribers.

According to a release, the Media Development Authority (MDA) has fined SingNet S$220,000 for an island-wide Mio TV service disruption on 15 May 2013.

The incident, which occurred at around 1 a.m. on 15 May 2013, lasted about nine hours, and affected some 26,000 Mio TV subscribers across various parts of Singapore. Those impacted reported that they could not boot up their Mio TV set-top boxes to view the channels they had subscribed to. The issue was eventually resolved at around 10 a.m. on the same day.

Investigations revealed that the incident was triggered by a maintenance activity carried out on 14 and 15 May 2013. The routine maintenance involved the replication of video-on-demand content to another server but the operation failed as the hard disk of the receiving server was full. While attempting to recover the failed operation, a wrong recovery command was subsequently keyed in by SingNet’s contractor, resulting in the set-top boxes of subscribers failing to boot up properly.

As a Nationwide Subscription Television Service Licensee, SingNet must comply with licence conditions on Quality of Service (QoS), which requires pay-TV services to be provided at reasonable quality that meets public expectations and is satisfactory to the MDA. MDA assessed that SingNet has not exercised due care and diligence when carrying out routine maintenance activities during the incident. MDA thus finds SingNet to be in contravention of its QoS licence conditions, and has imposed a financial penalty of S$220,000.

In determining the financial penalty, MDA took into consideration factors such as the service record of the licensee, the extent and duration of the disruption, and the compensation offered by the licensee to its subscribers. This is the third time in two years that SingNet has been found in breach of its QoS licence conditions. It was fined S$80,000 and S$180,000 respectively for its past two service disruptions.

MDA notes that following the disruption on 15 May 2013, SingNet has provided compensation to affected Mio TV subscribers in the form of a free one-month preview of all its channels and/or gift vouchers.