M1 blames upgrade drive for service disruption; offers one-week rebate to users

NETWORK operator M1 has blamed "a network bolstering initiative" for its protracted broadband service outage this week, as it ruled out other causes such as a network capacity crunch.

Two fibre failures on Tuesday and Wednesday have already sparked an investigation by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), as thousands of users - who were working and studying from home during Singapore's virus-battling quasi-lockdown - were affected.

"Our priority now is to ensure service reliability and we are taking extra measures to prevent a recurrence of such incidents," M1 chief executive Manjot Singh Mann said on Thursday evening, adding that the Keppel-owned telco is "co-operating fully" with the IMDA probe.

Besides rejecting a capacity shortage as a cause, M1 added that this week's disruptions were also not the result of dated equipment or a cyber attack.

It described the back-to-back outages on Tuesday and Wednesday as "unrelated", and said in its statement that the customer connectivity issues "were triggered by a network-bolstering initiative to improve customer experience".

The latest outage came about a month after mainboard-listed rival StarHub's home broadband ran into intermittent problems from network equipment failure and a domain-name server issue.

Network capacity was not a factor in those incidents either, and telecom players, as well as the regulator, have stressed that Singapore's Internet infrastructure has enough headroom to meet higher demand during the circuit breaker.

The IMDA had earlier told reporters that it "takes a serious view of any service disruption to public telecommunications, especially during the circuit-breaker period".

All users affected by the M1 disruption can sign up for a one-week rebate on their monthly home broadband bills in June - a tad more generous than the 20 per cent discount offered by StarHub, which was equivalent to six days of free home WiFi service.

M1 did not give the number of subscribers who will be eligible for the one-off fee rebate. It had about 224,000 fibre customers as at March 31, going by its parent Keppel's financial statements.

Keppel shares closed down by S$0.07, or 1.16 per cent, to S$5.97 on a cum-dividend basis on Thursday, before this announcement from its telco arm.