The damage caused by Saturday’s protests at CAT Telecom that left large swathes of Thailand without internet connectivity has been estimated at over $10 million (300 million baht) in damaged hardware alone.
CAT CEO Kittisak Sriprasert said that about 130 million baht of hardware was damaged with 200 million of other equipment, including power transmission. A police unit has been stationed around CAT Tower to prevent a recurrence.
In addition to a data center, the Bangrak building hosts both CAT’s national and international gateways.
This damage does not cover customer compensation which will be dealt with according to their contracts. Kittisak said that 91,680 customers were affected.
Kittisak denied that CAT was negligent and blamed the protesters for intending to cause damage. He did not rule out that it was an insider who sabotaged the systems. He said the company was reviewing CCTV logs to find out who caused the damage.
The damage to TOT has yet to be determined.
The outage affected CAT, TOT and True internet users and has re-opened the question on how well the state telcos were able to cope with disasters. Two months ago, CAT had argued that it should be given control over the national fiber network and that private operators should be forced to rent capacity from CAT. This incident has strengthened the private sector telco operators’ arguments who have pointed out that their networks were much better designed and did not crash during the power incident.