Debated in Parliament on 8 Apr 2013.
Ms Lee Li Lian asked the Minister for Communications and Information (a) for the past three months, what is the monthly network availability for Public Cellular Mobile Telephone Services for the three operators in Singapore; (b) why is network availability a compliance requirement for broadband services but not for Public Cellular Mobile Telephone Services; and (c) in view of M1's nationwide service outage on 15 January 2013 (i) whether the Ministry will provide an estimated cost suffered by businesses and consumers as well as loss of productivity; and (ii) what can the Ministry do in the future to ensure that such disruptions do not happen.
IDA’s Quality of Service (QoS) frameworks for mobile telephone services comprise of indicators meant for operators’ compliance and IDA's monitoring. As the three mobile telephone operators have typically achieved an average of more than 99.9% network
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availability for many years, IDA classified this indicator for monitoring purposes. SingTel Mobile and StarHub Mobile performed above that benchmark in the recent months. M1's network availability remained above 99.9%, except in January 2013 where its network outage caused its performance to dip by about 2%.
IDA is investigating the outage to M1's mobile telephone network pursuant to IDA's Code of Practice for Telecommunication Service Resiliency (Resiliency Code). A breach of the Resiliency Code carries a penalty of up to $1 million or 10% of Annual Gross Turnover (AGTO), whichever is higher. The maximum penalty is thus greater than the maximum penalty of $50,000 if IDA had made network availability a compliance indicator, and held the operator accountable for failing to meet the indicator. Singapore's penalties for disruptions are higher than those in other countries, such as Hong Kong, where penalties range from about S$32,000 to S$161,000, and in the UK where penalties are capped at about S$3.77 million.
IDA views M1's service disruption in January 2013 seriously. The disruption affected a wide range of consumers and businesses, and thus the perceived value of the disrupted services also varies greatly. Hence, it is difficult to estimate the impacted costs to users.
IDA is studying the learning points from this incident, with a focus on preventive measures that can help ensure such disruptions do not recur in the future. IDA will share these learning points with the three operators.
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