Dtac CEO Jon Eddy Abdullah has come out fighting saying that nothing will stop Dtac from the future, least of all the latest network outage.
Ever since the router failure on August 28, the telco has been under attack from many sides. Within hours, the regulator immediately said it would fine Dtac between 20 and 30 million baht ($637,000 to $956,000), a figure that soon became “hundreds of millions” in the latest comments to the media.
Well-known consumer advocate Saree Ongsomwang, who was appointed to lead the NBTC’s investigation into the network failure, demanded that Dtac give 130 free minutes, double the outage time, in cross-networks to all users without them having to ask for it.
Dtac has asked subscribers to put in a claim for compensation and has offered 80 off-peak, on-network minutes for prepaid subscribers or 100 anytime cross network minutes for postpaid.
Abdullah said that the reason for not automatically compensating everyone was because at this stage it is unclear who was affected, only that an estimated 20% of Dtac’s 23.5 million users were involved.
Asked why Dtac had not stressed the benefits of its ongoing network upgrade and the all-IP network upgrade to the public, Abdullah said now was time to keep things simple. However, to a more technical audience, the benefits of an all-IP network and IP exchange were clear as it would result in lower tariffs in the long run.
“We will continue to hammer away on the new network and the increased benefits. We won’t let a incident stop us from this.
“Don’t tie the December and January events to this. That was specific to the migration challenge and the cut fiber - totally different. Had we not experienced it, this recent issue would have been more manageable [in terms of media fallout],” he said referring to the HLR failure and the two accidents that left two redundant fiber optic cables cut in the earlier outages.