DTAC fined Bt10m for network failure

DTAC chief executive officer Jon Eddy Abdullah said his company, the second-largest cellular operator, was willing to pay the fine. He admitted that the incident had caused a negative perception of the company but added that it would launch several campaigns and activities to boost customer satisfaction and encourage them to stick with its network.
The fine of Bt10 million is based on a joint calculation of the damages caused by the breakdown. DTAC said the network was down for 65 minutes and the damage to affected customers was Bt6 million, but the NBTC found that the downtime was 105 minutes and the damage Bt14 million. The NBTC added the two amounts together and divided them by two, resulting in the fine amount, Takorn said.
From now on, fines for cellular-network failures will be easier to work out under new criteria set this week, using flat rates regardless of actual damages to users. As these criteria were just introduced this Tuesday, they did not apply to the DTAC case, as its latest network failure was on August 28. Coincidentally, however, the fine worked out to be the same as the new minimum of Bt10 million.
Under the new criteria, failure to ensure network quality will be subject to a fine of Bt10 million, regardless of actual damage value, for a first occurrence. The second failure will be subject to a fine of Bt12.5 million, the third Bt15 million, and the fourth Bt17.5 million. If it happens a fifth time, it will be subject to an amount determined by the NBTC.
DTAC was fined Bt20,000 for an earlier network failure, on January 8, but has declined to pay it pending appeal.
The glitch on August 28, DTAC’s fifth network failure in the past 10 months, stemmed from a fault of one of the several pairs of MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) signalling routers at the Rangsit Switching Centre, resulting in combined downtime of 65 minutes around noon. The mishap affected about 20 per cent of its customers in various parts of the country.
The NBTC issued an order to DTAC on May 28 to prevent more breakdowns. The company appealed against the order, but the NBTC’s telecom committee declined to accept the appeal.
Last 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 fault that affected many customers in the Southern provinces.
On January 8, a car accident in Pran Buri destroyed DTAC’s fibre-optic-cable route that provides service to customers in the South, and a few minutes later |a brush fire in Phetchaburi |burned a power pole and DTAC’s backup fibre-optic cable. About 1.8 million subscribers in the South were affected for two and a half hours.
On May 4, DTAC’s main fibre-optic trunk in the upper North and a backup line failed, disrupting communication services to many subscribers in the area.
DTAC is compensating its affected customers from the latest network failure, an amount expected to reach Bt300 million. It claims that the five network failures have cost it about Bt500 million in compensation payments.
DTAC has about 24 million subscribers.