M1 vows to fight $300,000 IDA fine

The Telco says IDA got its facts wrong and refutes the IDA's findings.

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore has imposed a financial penalty on M1 Limited for breaching the Code of Practice for Telecommunication Service Resiliency. This follows IDA’s investigation into the disruption of M1’s mobile services on 18 May 2011, which found that M1 had not fulfilled its obligation to provide resilient mobile telephone services.

IDA’s statement said, “The mobile service disruption caused some of M1’s mobile subscribers in the western region of Singapore to experience difficulty in making and receiving calls and accessing SMS, MMS and mobile data services via mobile phones. Investigations showed that the service disruption was caused by faulty hardware cards in M1’s backend systems. This affected the normal functioning of a database in M1’s network that is used to identify and update the location of M1’s subscribers at the western part of Singapore. Mobile services to these end users were thus disrupted. 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.

Given the serious impact of the service disruption, IDA has decided to impose a financial penalty of $300,000 on M1 for its contravention of the Service Resiliency Code.”

M1 later released a response to IDA’s statement, saying that it will file an appeal against the enforced action. “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.”