NBTC to examine fairness of DTAC offer over its latest failure

DTAC’s offer for Tuesday’s failure is that prepaid customers they can get free call credit within the company’s network for a total of 80 minutes, from 11pm to 5pm. To benefit from the offer, which is valid for seven days, they have to dial *10250.
Post-paid customers, meanwhile, can opt for free calling credit to any network for 100 minutes, valid for 30 days, or seven days’ free and unlimited mobile Internet. To take up the offer, subscribers have to dial *1737.
The deadline for signing up to the offers is tomorrow.
Prawit is concerned that some subscribers will find it inconvenient or difficult to receive compensation via such a method, unlike previous occasions when DTAC automatically and directly compensated customers.
The office also has to devise new guidelines to make sure that the compensation methods of all telecom operators do not put a burden on consumers, he said.
DTAC chief executive officer Jon Eddy Abdullah yesterday said the issue this time was very different from the previous events, which made it more difficult to identify which customers had been affected.
When asked if the network failure would hurt DTAC’s image and cause some subscribers to move to other networks, he merely said the company stood by its service and was on its way to delivering the highest-quality service network, and would not be distracted by the latest fault.
The watchdog’s office on Tuesday said it would definitely slap a fine on DTAC because Tuesday’s incident was its fifth network failure in the past year. The penalty could be in the range of Bt20 million to Bt30 million, |it said.
DTAC chief corporate affairs officer Darm Sukontasap yesterday said the agency should calculate the fine fairly and in line with the actual damage caused. He expressed confidence that there would be no repeat of the network failure.
DTAC said in a statement on Tuesday that one of several pairs of MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) signalling routers at the Rangsit Switching Centre had developed a fault, resulting in combined downtime of 65 minutes around noon.
The mishap affected about 20 per cent of customers in various parts of the country. The fault has been fixed and service has returned to normal, the statement said.
On December 21, DTAC experienced a network fault that was the result of a critical migration of data from one database to another.
On January 5, it experienced another network fault that affected many customers in the southern provinces, who were then affected by another incident just three days later.
On May 4, DTAC’s main fibre-optic trunk in the upper North and a back-up line failed, disrupting communication services to many subscribers in the area.
DTAC is the country’s second-largest cellular operator, with some 24 million subscribers.