Singapore  – The Media Development Authority (MDA) has fined SingTel S$180,000 for a disruption to its mio TV service on 13 May 2012.

Investigations revealed the island-wide disruption affected some 115,000 mio TV subscribers who were tuning-in to the concluding matches of the 2011/2012 Barclays Premier League (BPL) season on 13 May 2012. Some of the affected areas included Yishun, Choa Chu Kang, Clementi, Bukit Timah, Toa Payoh, Marine Parade, Punggol and Pasir Ris. Viewers experienced reception issues including intermittent screen freezes and blurred images from 10.15pm onwards. Full service quality was only restored at around 12.15am after the televised matches concluded.

Investigations traced the cause of the service disruption to the higher level of channel switching activity among subscribers while viewing the live BPL matches, which led to network congestion and resulted in reception difficulties for the subscribers.

As a Nationwide Subscription Television Service Licensee, SingTel has to comply with licence conditions on Quality of Service (QoS), which requires pay-TV services to be provided at reasonable quality that meets public expectations and is satisfactory to the MDA. MDA thus finds SingTel to be in contravention of its QoS licence conditions, and has imposed a financial penalty of S$180,000.

Since the disruption on 13 May 2012, MDA notes that SingTel has provided compensation to affected Mio TV subscribers in the form of subscription rebates amounting to about S$5 million, and has taken remedial actions to prevent a recurrence.