StarHub says sorry with 20% rebate on home broadband fee for affected customers

STARHUB on Thursday apologised "unreservedly" for the inconvenience caused by the intermittent disruption of its home broadband services to some of its customers on Wednesday, and is offering affected customers a one-time 20-per-cent rebate on their monthly home broadband fee.

This is equivalent to six days of free home WiFi service, it said. A dedicated website will be made available for affected customers to register for the rebate. It will announce details to customers soon.

"Network resilience and quality are matters StarHub takes seriously, especially with more people working and studying from home during the nationwide circuit breaker. During the disruption, StarHub's top priority was to restore services swiftly for affected customers," it said.

Peter Kaliaropoulos, CEO of StarHub also said: "The root cause has been identified as an internal network change management process, and our key priority now is to ensure service stability and quality.  We have taken immediate steps to implement measures to prevent a recurrence, and we are reviewing relevant processes."

He added that the telco is also cooperating fully with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA)  in investigations, and welcomes any infrastructure audit by IMDA as needed.

"This incident was not caused by any out-of-date equipment, capacity shortage or a cyber attack. Our network infrastructure is robust; we utilise hardware and software from global technology leaders, and redundancies are built-in as part of our extensive business continuity planning.

"We assure our customers that our network traffic is well below available capacity and ample redundancy has been built into our network to cater for high service levels to be delivered consistently. We will increase our efforts, review our processes, reinforce training initiatives and continue to be vigilant as robust network quality underpins our customers' confidence in the services we provide."

On Wednesday, at around 11am,  some customers in north and north-eastern Singapore had faced a brief disruption to their fibre services, due to an isolated fault in a piece of network equipment. StarHub said back-up equipment took over immediately, and affected services resumed progressively for customers. The faulty equipment was forthwith replaced with a new unit, and services were closely monitored for stability.

But later, in a separate and unrelated incident, at about 3:50pm, StarHub discovered a network issue with its Domain Name Servers (DNS) that serve home broadband customers. There was an intermittent issue in performing queries to the DNS, which resulted in some customers experiencing slow or no Internet access.

The issue was rectified and affected services were fully restored at 8:20pm the same day. Mobile broadband, TV and services to enterprise customers were unaffected, it said.