Bukit Panjang Telephone Exchange

Bukit Panjang Telephone Exchange is a telephone exchange in Bukit Panjang. It is owned by the IDA and formerly operated by Singapore Telecoms, of which owns the telecom exchanges, ducts and manholes used to support the Nationwide Broadband Network (“NBN”).

It operates various services -
 * DBS Bank: Toa Payoh Central, Bukit Panjang, Jurong Point, Woodlands and Raffles Place
 * OCBC Bank: Changi Airport, Jurong Point, Woodlands, Bukit Panjang
 * UOB Bank: Woodlands and Bukit Panjang
 * StarHub: Fibre optic services, cable TV services
 * Singapore Turf Club outlets
 * Singapore Pools outlets
 * M1: Fibre optic services especially Causeway Point
 * SingTel: Bukit Panjang, Choa Chu Kang, Woodlands and Yishun fibre optic networks

Fire Incident
A fire broke out at the Bukit Panjang exchange (the “Exchange”)1, at around 1402hrs on 9 October 2013, at one of the four lead-in entry locations in the Exchange’s cable chamber. The fire damaged optical fibre cables and affected telecommunication services provided by multiple operators in the northern and western parts of Singapore, including fixed voice, broadband Internet access and mobile services. The service disruption also affected telecom and broadcast services to close to 270,000 subscribers, including residential users, some government agencies, businesses, financial institutions, and multi-application kiosks providing e-commerce and payment services. The affected services were fully restored on 17 October 2013 at 0220hrs.

Service restoration work commenced around 1815hrs (after SCDF’s site clearance) on 9 October 2013, via a two-pronged approach: (i) diverting of telecommunication traffic from affected cables to other spare cables at the Exchange that were not affected by the Incident; and (ii) repairing the damaged cables, where damaged sections of the fibre cables were cut away and rejoined (or spliced) strand-by-strand. SingTel completed the restoration of its fibre cables on 11 October 2013 around 0715hrs, and full restoration of SingTel’s fixed line services was achieved at 1500 hours on 14 October 2013 (i.e., after 120 hours and 58 minutes).

IDA also noted that SingTel had certain business continuity management (“BCM”) policies and processes in place, and that SingTel had implemented these during the Incident. However, SingTel’s BCM did not have specific contingency plans to address serious service outage situations of such a scale as the Bukit Panjang incident.

Eight out of the 53 fibre cable rings connecting through the Exchange were temporarily routed using one single cable entry point, representing a single point of failure for that Exchange. While such temporary routing of fibre cable rings is sometimes unavoidable due to construction work, the original routings should be restored as soon as possible, e.g., when works are completed.

The Multi Cable Transit system is a cable sealing system that provides protection from fire, smoke, water and blast pressures at the point where cables enter an exchange through the cable chamber. The use of this system does not require hot works.