dtac compensates customers in Southern provinces after 3-hour service interruption
dtac announced that it would waive a 48 hour service fee for 1.8 million customers, mostly in seven southern provinces, after the second service interruption in less than three weeks.
Dr.Darmp Sukontasap, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Total Access Communication PLC (dtac), announced that the company would waive service fee for 48 hours, for over 1.8 million dtac customers affected by a three hour service interruption from dtac on the evening of 5 January 2012. Over 900,000 affected dtac customers were from the seven southern provinces of Chumporn, Surat Thani, Trung, Krabi, Nakorn Sri Thammarat, Phuket and Phung Nga. There rest were spread out in various parts of the country.
Service interruption started when, on 5 January 2012 at around 3.30 pm, the company found that its Mobile Switching Center (MSC) in Surat Thani province was under-performing and the call success rate of dtac customers in such areas had dropped to around 50-60%, resulting in a congestion in dtac’s network system and causing over 1.8 million dtac customers to have difficulty in dialing out or receiving calls.
Eventually, dtac’s technology team was able to resolve the problem at around 6.45 pm and the situation gradually returned to normal at around 8.30 pm on the same day, with the call success rate returning to the 98-99 per cent.
“This problem was an isolated incident which occurred during our on-going effort to upgrade our system. The management and staff at dtac would like to apologize to our customers for the inconvenience caused. We take full responsibility for what happened and will promptly compensate our customers for their inconvenience,” said Dr. Darmp.
According to the company, it would compensate its estimated 1.8 million customers by waiving the service fee for affected customers for 48 hours starting from noon time, 4 January, and ending at noon time 6 January 2012.
Dr. Darmp announced further that “in an effort to prevent a recurrence of a similar service interruption, dtac has also decided to temporarily suspend all its system upgrading exercise and to work closely with Ericsson (Thailand) Ltd., its vendor, to re-examine all the processes and procedures of the exercise. This may cause a slight delay in the company’s system upgrade effort, but it will help ensure that the risk of future service interruptions is minimized and that, in the longer term, dtac will be able to provide the best possible products and services for its customers”.
“With the past two unfortunate incidents, we do realize that we will have work much harder to win back the confidence our customers. Therefore, we, the management and staff at dtac, would like to assure our customers that we will continue to redouble our efforts and do our utmost to prevent future problems in our service. And, more importantly, we will strive even harder to bring the best possible products and services to our customers. Once again, all of us at dtac would like to extend our sincere apologies to all our customers,” Dr. Darmp concluded.
