M1 tweaks site switches, software after outage

M1 is tweaking its site switches and software in the wake of a service disruption which lasted about five hours last week, it said yesterday.

The telco also said that a preliminary investigation of the disruption found that a pair of mobile site switches which acted in an "unstable manner" had caused "intermittent connection problems" between its switches and customer base. "The cause of this is still being investigated by our vendor," M1 said in a statement yesterday.

Last Tuesday morning, M1's customers faced difficulties making voice calls, exchanging text messages or accessing mobile data. The industry regulator, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, had expressed its concern, noting M1's other outages over the past year.

"Although we quickly identified and stabilised the unstable switches, the congestion had spread across our network," M1 said yesterday. "As a result, we had to clear the congestion across the network layers and services were restored when the congestion was cleared."

While M1 gets to the bottom of the mobile site switch's instability, it is reconfiguring its site switches to "eliminate congestion" that might result from unstable intermittent connections, its CEO Karen Kooi said yesterday.

A "software enhancement" will also be deployed to help the telco better manage sudden and unexpected traffic conditions, Ms Kooi added.

An independent expert will also be appointed to review M1's network architecture and connectivity. Last year, M1 was fined $1.5 million for an outage of its 2G and 3G mobile services which lasted more than 60 hours.