Five hours of disruption to cable television just cost StarHub $50,000 in fine, paid dearly to the Media Development Authority (MDA).
The disruption took place back in Sep 28, 2013 in the wee hours or the morning at 12.40am. The disruption was estimated to have affected about 170,000 StarHub Cable Vision (SCV) subscribers across Singapore, resulting in complete signal loss for both paid and free-to-air TV channels accessed through their cable points. All services were fully restored later on at 5.30am.
As thousands of folks expressed their dissatisfaction over the turmoil to their late-night entertainment fix, investigations revealed that the service disruption was due to a power trip of a switchboard at SCV’s Ayer Rayah Headend. MDA determined that the disruption could have been prevented or reduced if SCV had actually installed effective contingency measures to deal with the power overload.
In contravention of the Quality of Service licence condition, StarHub was slapped a financial penalty of $50,000. The cable operator has since undertaken remedial actions to prevent a recurrence.
Photo: StarHub website screengrab
