SINGAPORE – About 5,000 users of broadband services in central and north-east Singapore were affected by a fibre service outage on April 18 caused by a contractor damaging cables during construction work.

Singapore’s three major telcos – Singtel, StarHub and M1 – were impacted during the outage, which lasted about 20 hours and was resolved at 7am on April 19.

The authorities are looking into the disruption, which was caused by “contiguous bored pile works” for the North-South Corridor project. Such works involve drilling large vertical holes into the ground and filling them with concrete to form a protective wall for excavation.

Cable provider NetLink Trust (NLT) said on April 18 that it takes a serious view of the service disruption “caused by errant contractors and will not hesitate to take necessary actions against the errant party”.

In a 2022 parliamentary reply, Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo said an average of 570 end users were affected by such incidents between 2019 and 2022.

She said the Infocomm Media Development Authority takes a serious view of service disruptions that have occurred due to construction activity, and cited regulations put into place in 2019 which mandate a nine-step process contractors must comply with when working on areas with such cables.

The process includes getting service layout plans from telcos and engaging a licensed person to carry out cable detection work.

Mrs Teo also gave stats on the number of incidents in that period: 12 in 2019, four in 2020, seven ...