MCOT to face heavy fine for digital TV blackout

BANGKOK: -- The Mass Communications Organisation of Thailand is likely to face a heavy fine after its digital TV networking services collapsed on Friday rendering digital TV blackout for about half an hour.

Mr Thakorn Tanthasith, secretary-general of the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, said that several digital TV stations such as Channel 10 of the parliament, Channel 14 (MCOT-Family), Channel 19 (Spring News), Channel 21 (Voice TV) and Channel 32 (Thai Rath TV) were blacked out for about half an hour starting at 2 pm after MCOT’s networking system collapsed.

The problem was fixed about half an hour later and the affected stations managed to resume their normal operations.

Mr Thakorn said the NBTC office had notified MCOT to report the cause of the disruption and to prevent the problem from recurring. However, he added that he would raise the problem with the Broadcasting Board at the next meeting and to consider levying an administrative fine on MCOT amounting to a maximum of five million baht plus a daily fine of 100,000 baht.

Mr Thakorn explained that MCOT, the networking service provider, was required to provide networking services to its clients of at least 99.98 percent of the airtime throughout the year. This means that broadcasting airtime of each digital TV station can be interrupted not more than one hour and 45 minutes per year.

He went on saying that the blackout today had affected a lot of audience who tuned to the affected digital TV stations.

Source: http://englishnews.thaipbs.or.th/mcot-to-face-heavy-fine-for-digital-tv-blackout

-- Thai PBS 2015-09-11

I thought MCOT is State owned. Is the government fining itself?

I thought MCOT is State owned. Is the government fining itself?

Much the same rewarding the cops for doing their job???

Is any digital service here stable?

Our internet has so many mini outages throughout the day.....all part of the service I guess!!

My true Internet was down due to technical problems for a couple of days last week

Maybe I should seek to impose a fine too

My true Internet was down due to technical problems for a couple of days last week

Maybe I should seek to impose a fine too

I think you will find that the contract you signed does not guarantee any minimum uptime.

Shame it wasn't for a week give the people a break from the Friday night stand up comedy hour.

My true Internet was down due to technical problems for a couple of days last week

Maybe I should seek to impose a fine too

I think you will find that the contract you signed does not guarantee any minimum uptime.

I've never bothered to read the terms of service (probably in Thai script anyway)

It was caused by aaphysically broken cable around lunchtime Sunday and they're was no repair scheduled until Friday but magically they fixed it on Thursday... Probably due to the amount of disgruntled customers etc

The cables are low hanging in our soi anyway and anytime a tall truck comes down they usually get snagged etc but of course in Thai, very unlikely

In the UK, any month our Internet service was interrupted for any length of time due to technical problems, we got compensated by at least a free month of ADSL etc

Re True Online, believe it or not, if you have an extended period of no internet or unuseable internet servive, you can request and really receive a billing credit from them.

Ive done it a number of different times with True online, including a recent two week period where our connection was regularly -- hourly -- dropping and it took them more than a half dozen service calls to our home to finally identify and solve the problem....which in the end apparently was due to a faulty router-modem they had issued us.

True wont do it for half hour outages. But if you're out for a couple days or more, they will -- if you're firm and insistent about it with their telephone call center staff.