Paddy Tan, CEO and Executive Director of BST Mobile, is a long time supporter of M1 and was their customer since the start of their operations in 1997.
However, the six hour M1 outage on Tuesday resulted in major loss of productivity for him and his business, given that most of his team and clients were returning from the Chinese New Year Holidays.
“Clients could not contact me since the start of the work day,” said Paddy.
“I missed several important, possibly deal-clinching, conference calls with clients and the worst part was that I could not even call or email them to inform because M1 mobile network was down.”
As Paddy had planned this new work day to be out of office for meetings, he could only communicate with his team and clients via his mobile phone.
“I had to zip between wifi zones to start contactable and this was very unproductive for me,” said Paddy.
“If one could put the loss of productivity into dollars and cents, I think I would have lost a few thousands of dollars on Tuesday, no thanks to M1.”
As the leader of the mobile app company, Paddy depended heavily on his mobile network to be up in order to send business emails, instant message with clients and associates and conduct business calls, both local and overseas, especially when he is on the road.
“M1 was down in 2012 for 3 days and I would have thought that they would have learnt that downtime can be costly for their customers,” said Paddy.
“I expect zero downtime from my service provider, especially with one that I have been loyal with since 1997.”
M1 was fined by IDA, Singapore Telecoms Authority, in 2012 for SGD1.5 million for the six days outage. The penalty for the 2014 outage have not been determined by the authorities as of time of this post.
“Though I have no intentions to switch to the other service provider, I am delaying renewing my contract with M1, though the last contract has expired for awhile,” said Paddy.
Network outages, in today Internet dependent society, can be expensive for businesses. It could result in loss of reputation, revenue and even results in fines by the authorities.
If you an IT professional worried about the consequences of downtime, start monitoring as a form of insurance against downtime.
