Telcos should face tougher regulations to ensure service standards amid Smart Nation push

SINCE the government announced in February 2024 that it would invest up to S$100 million to upgrade Singapore’s Nationwide Broadband Network to run on speeds up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps), telcos have taken heed and offered faster speeds for lower prices.

To qualify for the funding, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) said that telcos will need to show how they intend to “excite the market to bring consumers in”.

Since then, most telcos have begun offering 2.5 Gbps plans for largely similar prices to their former 1 Gbps plans. Some have even gone ahead and offered full 10 Gbps speeds at even lower prices.

For instance, Simba now offers a 10 Gbps plan for S$29.99 per month – a price that previously only yielded customers 5 per cent of the speed with incumbent M1 a year ago.

However, amid the rush to offer greater speeds to consumers, the authorities should also better regulate telcos’ service standards.

To be fair, service standards of the three largest telcos – Singtel, M1 and StarHub – appear to have held steady up to the second quarter of this year, based on IMDA’s latest quality of service (QoS) standards report.

StarHub was the only telco to have fallen short of the IMDA’s QoS standards, after its network availability fell to 99.89 per cent in May 2024 due to a “service difficulty incident”.

Telcos must meet network availability of higher than 99.9 per cent under IMDA’s QoS standards.

IMDA said that it is investigating StarHub’s May 30 incident.

Since then, however, there have been a spate of incidents that have shaken consumer confidence.

Dealing with disruptions

On Aug 20, StarHub users faced issues for some four hours connecting to their broadband and TV services after an issue with its domain name system (DNS) servers.

A DNS server serves as an address book of sorts, converting alphanumeric website addresses to numerical strings of Internet protocol addresses where data is hosted on the Internet.

Meanwhile, MyRepublic, whose broadband unit is now majority-owned by StarHub, has suffered four fibre broadband outages of varying lengths between July and September.

The latest outage, which started on Sep 30 and affected customers in the north-east of Singapore, is believed to have stretched over several days.

MyRepublic on Oct 1 said that it had fixed the problem. However, even on Oct 3, customers continued to complain on the company’s Facebook page about issues they were facing.

IMDA has said that it will investigate MyRepublic’s latest outage, although it is unclear how it might penalise the company if it is found to have fallen short of any standards.

IMDA’s QoS standards apply to broadband access service providers that have a market share of 10 per cent or more in the fixed-line residential or business fibre broadband markets.

According to regulatory disclosures in 2022 when StarHub was acquiring its stake in MyRepublic, StarHub had a 34 per cent market share of the broadband market as at September 2021, while MyRepublic held 6 per cent.

Meanwhile, market leader Singtel held 43.4 per cent of the broadband market share then.

When IMDA approved the merger at the time, it noted that the residential broadband space would still have at least five other competitors post-acquisition.

However, only Singtel, M1 and StarHub have been tracked quarterly under the IMDA’s fibre broadband QoS regime.

This suggests that the other telcos, such as MyRepublic, Viewqwest and Simba, fall outside of the regulatory regime.

Tougher stance needed

As Singapore pushes further to enhance the security and resilience of local digital infrastructure, perhaps the government ought to relook its fibre broadband regulatory regime as well.

As it stands, telcos found in breach of the standards will only have to face a maximum fine of S$50,000 for each instance of non-compliance with IMDA’s regulations.

Assuming that the average household pays S$40 a month for fibre broadband, that amount is just the cost of about 52 households’ broadband subscriptions over two years.

On its website, IMDA said that higher penalties may be imposed for “serious failures” as well as “continuing or repeated breaches”. However, it does not define these terms, or the potentially higher penalties.

Such QoS fines should be harsher and apply to telcos regardless of their size.

If smaller telcos get a pass to skimp on the necessary capital expenditure to reduce prices but sacrifice service quality, everyone loses.

Customers lose reliable access to digital infrastructure they need for work and play, while larger players shed market share and lose revenue to their smaller, less-regulated competition.

This is surely not the intended result of freer competition which is meant to give customers faster speeds for lower prices.

Aside from improving the quality of service regime, the government should also mandate that telcos provide timely service reports when they experience outages as part of the Digital Infrastructure Act.

Such disclosures will not only give customers a better understanding of when service outages are expected to end, but also help the industry learn from each other’s mistakes in the process.

The stakes have risen. As more employees work from home, such disruptions could potentially disrupt more crucial business activities.

It was particularly jarring when MyRepublic customers were told to refer to the company’s outage tracking site for more updates on Sep 30, only for there to be radio silence even after its engineers had apparently issued a fix on Oct 1.

Interestingly, MyRepublic’s Facebook post on the matter has since been deleted.

Considering the immense value that is generated from the data that runs over these telcos’ pipes, regulations should be strengthened to ensure the quality of networks on which customers rely.