Telecommunication Outages in Past Three Years

Ms Joan Pereira asked the Minister for Communications and Information (a) how many telecommunication outages have occurred in the past three years; and (b) what measures has the Ministry put in place to prevent the occurrences of these outages.

Mr S Iswaran: A reliable and resilient telecommunication network is critical to our Smart Nation ambitions. That is why MCI and the Infocommunications Media Development Authority (IMDA) work with key telecommunication operators to ensure good service quality, including through IMDA’s Quality of Service frameworks.

Since 2016, the number of telecommunication outages has averaged 10 outages each year. These outages were mostly due to cable cuts by contractors, or faults in the telecommunication networks.

MCI and IMDA have taken measures to minimise the risk of outages. IMDA requires key telecommunication operators to regularly audit their networks to ensure that they are on par with international best practices. IMDA also educates contractors to avoid cable cuts when carrying out earthworks. IMDA also penalises telecommunication operators which contribute to outages, or which fail to restore disrupted services quickly.