Last month, the Government fined SingTel $50,000 for a pay TV service outage that affected six per cent or 10,000 households here. -- PHOTO: AFP
TELECOMMUNICATIONS firms that engage in anti-competitive behaviour or whose services fall short could face significantly tougher sanctions.
The Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (Mica), in a consultation paper released on Friday, said that it is looking at tougher measures against telecommunications companies in light of the increasingly critical role their services, from mobile phones to Internet access, play in society.
Currently, companies that breach the Telecoms Act, which regulates the conduct of players providing telecommunications services like SingTel and StarHub, are liable for fines of up to $1 million.
This, said Mica, 'is low and may not be adequate to achieve its original policy objective of providing an effective deterrent to non-compliance with regulatory conditions.' It wants to change this to $1 million or 10 per cent of the offender's annual revenue, whichever is higher.
This means that SingTel, which pocketed nearly $4.6 billion for telecommunications services for its financial year ended Mar 31, could face a penalty of nearly $460 million if its services fail to meet standards, while M1, which reported sales of $782 million last year, would face a smaller penalty of just $78 million if it fell short.
Last month, the Government fined SingTel $50,000 for a pay TV service outage that affected six per cent or 10,000 households here.
'Such an approach would enable (tech sector regulator) Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) to levy a proportionately higher penalty on bigger licensees while maintaining sufficient deterrent for smaller licensees,' said Mica.
And those who do not pay up - or pay up promptly - could be barred from doing business until they cough up the fine, it said.
'To increase the effectiveness of the financial penalty as a sanction, MICA proposes to empower IDA to be able to suspend or cancel the whole or part of a licence, or to reduce the period for which a licence is to be in force,' it said, especially since suing individual offenders in court 'is both inefficient and uneconomical, especially for small amounts.'
