Singapore’s Media Development Authority (MDA) has fined StarHub Cable Vision (SCV) S$50,000 or about $37,500 for a cable television disruption in 2013.
The incident, which started at around 12.40 a.m. of September 28, lasted for nearly five hours and is estimated to have affected about 170,000 SCV subscribers across Singapore.
Those impacted experienced a complete signal loss for both paid and free-to-air TV channels, which are accessed through their SCV cable points.
Services were progressively restored within five hours from the onset of the incident. Free-to-air TV channels were restored by 1.35 a.m., while other channels were fully restored by 5.30 a.m.
Investigations revealed that the root cause of the service disruption was a power trip of a switchboard at SCV’s Ayer Rajah Headend.
MDA has determined that the disruption could have been prevented or made less severe if SCV had put in place effective contingency measures to deal with the power surge, such that the back-up system would not have been overloaded.
In determining the financial penalty, MDA took into consideration factors such as SCV’s service recovery actions, as well as the goodwill measures it subsequently extended to affected subscribers.