StarHub has entered what it calls the “next-gen broadband war” with its latest fibre-based broadband service plans, joining what is turning out to be a big fight for consumer dollars in a newly-shaken up market.

The “green” camp is charging S$68.27 a month for its 100Mbps fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) plan, which offers 50Mbps uploads and an international link of 15Mbps.

Credit: Shuttlestock

A strange thing happened yesterday in Singapore, when a slew of new broadband offerings became available at competitive prices, over the country’s new fibre optic network being extended to homes and offices.

The new next-gen network, four years in the making, is now starting to be available to homes and offices, which are being progressively hooked up. By mid-2012, 95 per cent of the island will be wired up.

Since the new network, partly funded by taxpayers’ dollars, mandates an open wholesale price for all telcos, no single operator gets preferential rates to use and resell the bandwidth provided by it. This means a level playing field for all telcos, and better deals for consumers down the stream.

Besides SingTel, which unveiled its next-gen broadband prices today, Singapore’s new high-speed broadband network will have services sold by local bigwigs StarHub and M1, as well as smaller operators SuperInternet and LGA, which count many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as customers.

The news came at a news conference held today by Nucleus Connect, which runs the switching and other networking gear for the NBN. It also wholesales the bandwidth to retail service providers (RSPs).

Nucleus Connect CEO David Storrie said network coverage – or a lack of it – was the reason why only five RSPs have signed up so far, despite earlier estimates of hundreds of service providers coming forward to leverage on the open pricing offered by the new broadband network.

Years after they first heard the phrase “ultra-fast broadband”, home owners and businesses here can finally log on to Singapore’s new next-gen broadband service next month, when it goes online with promises of faster speeds and cheaper rates.

SingTel today unveiled an aggressive price plan for new FTTH (fibre-to-the-home) services that already looks like forcing new competition in a market that many users have complained is plagued with slow and expensive services, especially when compared to those in South Korea or Hong Kong.

The new services will be available to users whose homes and offices are already wired up with fibre optic cables to Singapore’s next-gen broadband network. Homes are still being wired up at the moment.

Starting from S$85.90 a month, SingTel’s basic FTTH service for home users will offer download speeds of 150Mbps, upload of 75Mbps, and an international link of 15Mbps.

Bad news for users of Motorola Milestone here in Asia-Pacific.

While American owners of the popular Droid – a CDMA version of the GSM Milestone – are already getting Android 2.2 updates, users here will have to wait until early next year to get the OS update that gives them speedier operation and Flash support, among other goodies.

When I opened up the box for the Nokia C6 smartphone sent to Techgoondu for testing last week, I told myself to keep my expectations low – this was, after all, a low-cost phone from the rather beleaguered Finnish phone giant.

But what little doubt I had of Nokia’s recent decline immediately disappeared when I fired up this sadly outdated slide-out number sold exclusively by M1 for S$98 (with a two-year plan).

When some Microsoft folks recently asked me how users and techies felt about its upcoming Windows Phone 7 OS, I told them “you’re lucky to still be in the news”.

Until the past few weeks, when favourable first-looks of Microsoft’s totally rebuilt smartphone OS came online, the only OSes that anyone was talking about were Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

For an example of how fast a dominant OS can fall in interest level, look at Nokia’s Symbian OS that now powers most of its phones, as it transitions to the more advanced MeeGo. Who thinks anything great of Symbian now?

And compared to Nokia, Microsoft was worse off a few months ago – it only showed glimpses of what Windows Phone 7 was about at February’s Mobile World Congress and nothing more.

So, it was with a bit of surprise when I saw how well Windows Phone 7 was built, during a hands-on preview at the Microsoft offices here in Singapore last week.

Having lost crucial market share to Android and iOS, Microsoft has clearly done the right thing by building its new OS from ground up. Gone are the clunky “halfway house” touch offerings on Windows Mobile 6.5. Absent too is any lag that you get while moving around menus. In fact, pretty animations accompany most actions – without slowing things down.

Starcraft II, the much-sought-after sequel to the 90s real-time strategy hit, sold more than 1.5 million copies in the first 48 hours, placing it as one of the biggest PC games this year, though it is still some way off the all-time big hitters in video games sales.

SingTel added Justin Timberlake, Jay Chou and a number of other Sony Music artistes to its AMPed mobile music download catalogue last Wednesday, boosting the number of tracks on sale to its users to over 1 million.

The 150,000 new tracks will be accessible to more than 70 different mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone and Android numbers such as the Samsung Galaxy S and Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.

Why I wanted to post this piece of news, despite missing out on it last week, is the fact that SingTel has pressed ahead when other music stores that employ DRM (digital rights management), such as Soundbuzz, died a long-overdue death in the past couple of years.

Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Asus showed off a number of new notebooks featuring Bang & Olufsen’s Icepower audio amplification technology at a glitzy launch party here today.

The audio technology, which has been the talk of audiophile circles because of its use in a number of highly-rated power-efficient amplifiers, promises improved sound over existing laptop offerings.

Icepower will come in a number of Asus’ N-model laptops as well as its top-of-the-range NX90 Multimedia Notebook. There’s a reason why it’s called that, instead of a laptop, because you’d not want to place this 4.8kg machine on your lap (a small bag of rice weighs 5kg).