We have contacted Mr Ng and apologised to him for any inconvenience caused.

A surge in Short Message Service (SMS) and call traffic during the festive period is common, as subscribers send festive greetings to their friends and family.

We generally experience higher peaks in SMS and call traffic on festive occasions, such as New Year's Eve.

Measures to ensure the timely delivery of calls and SMSes were put in place.

These included increasing network resources at SMS centres and base stations to maximum capacity to handle expected increased traffic.

We also increased network capacity at certain countdown party locations to cater to large crowds concentrated in areas such as Orchard Road and Sentosa.

SMS delivery depends on several factors such as network conditions, subscribers' handset status (for instance, if the phone is switched off or its memory is full) and SMS system conditions between operators.

Despite these measures, we regret there was localised mobile network congestion around the hours of the New Year countdown in certain areas such as Clarke Quay where Mr Ng was.

Over�the recent New Year period, 33 million SMSes were processed on Dec 31, compared to a daily average of 18 million SMSes; on Jan 1, 27 million SMSes were processed on our network.

We thank Mr Ng for his feedback.

Cheam Tze Hui (Ms)
Corporate Communications Manager
SingTel