SingTel fire: Telco to offer compensation

SingTel will compensate its home customers who were left without broadband, phone and pay-TV services for days after a fire broke out at one of its nine key Internet facility. -- FILE PHOTO: SINGTEL
SingTel will compensate its home customers who were left without broadband, phone and pay-TV services for days after a fire broke out at one of its nine key Internet facility. -- FILE PHOTO: SINGTEL

SingTel will compensate its home customers who were left without broadband, phone and pay-TV services for days after a fire broke out at one of its nine key Internet facilities.

Some 60,000 home broadband service customers will get a speed boost for the next three months, the telco told The Straits Times on Monday. This means those on a 200Mbps plan will get bumped up to 300Mpbs for free, for example.

Affected mioTV customers will be given a month's worth of free viewing of all channels, while those who had their fixed voice line and mioVoice disrupted will get one- month's worth of free local calls.

For business customers, the telco said it will be reaching out to them individually to work out compensation packages.

As of Monday, small pockets of fibre broadband customers - including those from StarHub and M1 - were still without any broadband connection. SingTel reiterated that while it has managed to restore all of its connections, there might still be some "fine tuning" to be done.

Last Wednesday's fire at SingTel's Bukit Panjang Internet Exchange building led to mass disruptions for both consumer and business subscribers of at least six Internet service providers here. Two-thirds of the 149 fibre optic cables damaged by the fire belong to OpenNet, the builder of Singapore's ultra-fast national fibre broadband network. The rest of the cables belonged to SingTel.

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