MDA fines StarHub S$50,000 for cable TV disruption

Telecommunications group StarHub has to pay a S$50,000 fine for a cable television disruption on Sept 28, 2013, that lasted nearly five hours, the Media Development Authority (MDA) said in a statement on Friday.

The authority said that the root cause of the outage was a power trip of a switchboard at StarHub Cable Vision's Ayer Rajah Headend.

Though the initial electrical outage triggered back-up systems, these systems either tripped due to a sudden power surge during the switchover or ran out of power, MDA said.

It added that the disruption could have been milder or avoided altogether if StarHub had put in place "effective contingency measures to deal with the power surge, such that the back-up system would not have been overloaded".

It estimated that about 170,000 subscribers across Singapore experienced signal loss for both free and paid channels during the outage.

StarHub Cable Vision has undertaken remedial action to prevent a recurrence, the authority said, adding that it also took into account the "goodwill measures" the cable TV provider extended to affected subscribers when determining the fine.