Some subscribers of Singtel broadband were still without Internet access yesterday, a day after the telco said all its services were fully restored on Sunday morning following an islandwide outage.
They were unable to restart their modems and routers to re-sync their connection to the servers despite following the instructions they received from the telco.
Singtel said yesterday the problem bugged "a small number of customers'' and its technician had gone to their home or workplace to fix it. The outage for Singtel fibre broadband customers started on Saturday morning, and the telco is still investigating why its servers could not send IP addresses to customers' modems to enable broadband connectivity.
Most of the 10 subscribers interviewed yesterday had their connection restored except for Mr Daniel Tan, 36, owner of convenience store Angel Supermart. He re-started his Internet equipment multiple times with no success, he said, adding that the outage cost him about $300 a day.
Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA), the regulator, is also looking into what caused the outage. "IMDA takes Singtel's service disruption very seriously," a spokesman said yesterday. "IMDA is investigating the cause(s) of the incident and the service recovery measures taken by Singtel," it said in a statement.
Most Singtel customers said they regained access to the Internet by following the telco's instructions but several said it took more than one attempt.
Freelance musician John Paul Kwan, 28, had to manually edit his router settings as his modem was working but not his router after he reset both. "It's strange as I found out that a filtering system was enabled when it shouldn't be, which blocked Internet access," he said.
Mr Alvin Pang, 43, who works in information technology, rebooted his modem twice to restore the connection yesterday afternoon.
An irate Mr Tan of Angel Supermart said there were long queues and unhappiness at his shop in Woodlands over the weekend.
He added that he hired extra people to man the cashier counter and to manually count the stock and replenish goods, work that typically was done automatically through an online system using cloud storage.
He said Singtel should let subscribers like him terminate their contract without penalty for "major breakdowns like this".
Mr Rene Loh, 49, said his daughter dipped into her data plan at another telco for Internet access to finish her school assignment.
She used 75 per cent of her monthly plan in a few hours. Still he is undecided on whether to switch to another telco. "It may be slower or have its own problems too," he said.
