Singapore Next Generation of Broadband Network

Should everyone be excited over this New Generation of Broadband network?

Yes, IDA said that residence can get 100Mbps up to 1Gbps of network at our homes. What exactly does that mean? I got quite a few non-IT savvy friends were asking me regarding this. They felt very excited. And they want to install it immediately. They got pretty excited when they hear that the price for it is only $20+ for residential, $70+ for commercial.

What IDA has revealed are the LOCAL LOOP price. Which is the fiber price connecting to your home. IDA is funding this by using our tax payer money. But they will leave the commercial pricing to the RSP (Retail Service Provider) to decide what kind of package to sell and what kind of price they wanted to collect.

I am not so keen about this at all. Nowadays, any household can easily get 100Mbps of bandwidth pipe to your home, via Starhub Cable TV system. And SingTel will offer 15Mbps max at the moment to residential. But if you compare the surfing speed during PEAK hours, it is not hard to find that the following statement is true. Both network are SLOW at night, SingTel one is slowly crawling, but Starhub one sometimes cannot move. I have used both and I think this is very true. That is the exact reason why I switch from Starhub to SingTel because SingTel one can at least MOVE SLOWLY.

So, what is it so?

The reason is very simple. Unlike Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, Singapore basically has NO contents. i.e. There is a lot of Japanese language sites within Japan, this is because they have huge enough contents to drive traffic into Japan instead of going out of Singapore.

Top Web Sites that Singapore sufers go to

Out of the top 20 websites, almost all are overseas websites. That means, the ISP here will have to BUY backhaul traffic or IP Transits traffic from tier-1 ISP in the world. In layman term, the ISP in Singapore will have to buy Internet from the ISP in overseas that hosted these contents. Of course, they will buy that Internet in bulk at a much cheaper price. But still, it is a cost to all these ISP. And they have to OVERSUBSCRIBE the Internet in order to make it work and affordable for the ISP/Telco here to make "huge profits". As most of these Telco ISP are listed, so they have to answer to the share holders. :) Oversubscription means they are sharing the Internet of 1Mbps to 15 others Internet users (example: 1:15 ratio)

The following is an illustration of the ISP buying or peering Internet from bigger ISP in the world (i.e. tier-1 ISP).



So, given the above two reasons...

1. No contents in Singapore...

2. ISP in Singapore buys Internet from overseas bigger ISP and oversubscribe all Singapore users.

I concluded that, the openNet or IDA new Next Generation Broadband Network will be useless to me. Because if I subscribe to it, I think I will still get a very slow sleep surfing the web. And I believe it will become worst as now everybody has big pipe at cheap price to surf internet. And If I wanted a quality surfing speed, I will need to pay the ISP for that premium service.

So, who actually benefits from this? I think both Telco, Starhub and SingTel. Because, now Starhub can provide High Speed local loop to every where. And Singtel can provide high speed compare to their old ADSL technology which capped at 25Mbps. So, both will still fight each other, but both will still need to make money, so, it will be a friendly competitions. As for M1, good luck... because they do not own OpenNet or Neucleus Connect, so they cannot benefit from both.

I could be wrong, but let's wait and see. I am very sure that I will not pay for the cheap local loop as they need to box up in a very ugly manner in my newly renovated place.