Thailand’s number two telco has accepted a 10-million baht ($320,000) fine for its 65-minute partial network outage on 28 August.
Dtac CEO Jon Eddy Abdullah accepted the fine without challenging it. However, he noted that only an estimated 1.6 million users were affected out of the total customer base of 24 million.
Free airtime or data compensation has already been given to over three million customers worth over 100 million baht. Compensation claims are honoured without question and still being taken and Dtac expects total claims to top 300 million baht by the end of the week.
The outage was caused by a sub-contractor who knocked out a pair of MPLS routers at one of its switching centres.
“We have agreed to accept the fine without any challenge in order to show responsibility to our customers and telecom regulators for letting them down. The most recent incident was particularly disappointing since it was the result of a human error by a technician hired by one of our sub-contractors, which has nothing to do with the solid and high quality network that we have,” said Mr. Abdullah.
Abdullah stressed that while there had been a number of service interruptions since last December, this was not a pattern. Only the first incident was due to equipment in the network while the rest were caused by fiber cuts or errors by external sub-contractors.
The 10 million baht figure to be paid by dtac is historic in the sense that no Thai service operator, both in the telecom industry or otherwise, has ever been levied such a large fine for failing to provide efficient service to consumers.