Wireless@SG login screen - say goodbye to it

Hard to log in. Keep getting disconnected.

If those problems have kept you from surfing the Web with Wireless@SG, you’ll be happy to hear that the free Wi-Fi hotspot service islandwide is now going to be a breeze to use.

With a new secure sign-on system announced today, you will only need to sign in once on your PC or phone and never have to do it again when you next visit a Wireless@SG hotspot.

Often a tolerant lot, Singaporeans can accept a lot of things – slow broadband speeds, lack of full number portability (until last year) and even not being able to choose their government (in some wards).

But one thing they can’t stand, joked a journalist pal of mine, is to have their weekend football fix taken away. Should that happen, he declared, there’d be a “RIOOOOT!”

That perhaps explains why the Singapore media authorities did a stunning U-turn yesterday, saying that they might just  make SingTel share its fresh-in-the-bag Barclays Premier League rights with StarHub come next year.

Acting Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts Lui Tuck Yew, even went so far as to say the government was considering an universal pay-TV set-top box for Singapore homes, so that people don’t have to get two set-top boxes to watch BPL on SingTel and other popular channels that StarHub carries.

English Premier League

Maybe it’s the rumblings on the ground.

Maybe it’s StarHub playing the public card of late – appealing to the public, and more likely, its pay-TV subscibers, in full-page newspaper ads to group together and “share their views” on SingTel’s EPL (English Premier League) win for the next three seasons.

Whatever the reason, the red camp has today come up with prices to tune in to live EPL matches from next year, and it has kept to its promise of not asking for more cash.

Wireless@SG goes 1Mbps today

There’s nothing like a free lunch. But once in a while, you do get freebies without so much as firing up your laptop.

From today, users of Singapore’s Wireless@SG service will be getting a speed boost, as part of a handful of upgrades for the free Wi-Fi hotspot offering that were first announced at CommunicAsia 2009.

They will be able to surf at up to 1Mbps (instead of 512Mbps) at 7,500 hotspots islandwide. There is no need to re-configure their laptops or Wi-Fi-enabled cellphones, said the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) this morning, as it showed Techgoondu and other media a demo of the faster service at the Wi-Fi-enabled TCC cafe at NAFA.

D-Link's DIR-685 comes with the kitchen sink, sorry, an LCD screen

Even for the most hardcore users, you’d think that the ultimate router is one that has a gigabit WAN port and an OLED screen like D-Link’s Xtreme N Duo DIR-855.

Well, the company has just topped that by coming up with a router that also acts as a digital photo frame, as well as a network attached storage (NAS) device. Bar the kitchen sink, the new Xtreme N DIR-685 probably has almost all the features in a consumer router.

D-Link Singapore has just said that the S$399 “desktop-design” router will debut at the Comex computer show here next month.

So, what do you get for that sky-high price?

SingTel broadband users are seeing their webpages load slower than usual today, after what appears to be a pretty serious cut in the APCN2 submarine cables carrying Internet traffic in and out of Singapore.

The complaints had been coming in through Twitter and online forums the entire day, but it was not until late in the afternoon that confirmation came from ZDNet Asia that the problem was due to a fault in the APCN2 system, which serves a large part of the Asia-Pacific region.

The fault means users are only getting slow connections to overseas websites. Webpages are displaying slowly, while IM (instant messaging) messages are often slow to go through or are dropped altogether.

As you may have heard, some 95 per cent of Singapore is being wired up with fibre optic cables for the country’s next-generation broadband network, which promises an almost unlimited speed boost over existing SingTel’s copper-line phone system and StarHub’s HFC (hybrid fibre coaxial) network.

But little has been said about what this cable laying project means to the average Joe.

Earlier this week, OpenNet, the consortium tasked with wiring up Singapore, gave the media a glimpse of how things will pan out. The quick takeaway is that it is on-schedule, and will be sending letters to residents in selected areas to inform them that contractors would be coming to their homes to hook up the new cables.

StarHub MaxMobile Elite using Huawei USB modem

Heard of StarHub’s recent radio ads about their “blazing fast” mobile broadband offering?

Well, for the past month, Techgoondu has been testing the MaxMobile Elite service that promises as much as 21Mbps downloads on the go. And we have to say it rocks!

The proof of the pudding is in actual downloads, and I’ve to say I have not seen faster downloads on the go than with the black Huawei USB stick that I used to access this HSPA or 3.5G service.

I’m talking about bursts of as much as 1MB per sec (megabyte per second), or 8Mbps (megabits per sec), when I recently opened my laptop and plugged in the Huawei USB stick at the food court at Tiong Bahru Plaza.

In one of the surprises of the rather boring telecom scene here in Singapore, StarHub has just announced that it is going to be led by the former CEO of rival telco MobileOne, Neil Montefiore.

Current StarHub CEO Terry Clontz, who is retiring in January 2010, will be succeeded by Neil, who left M1 earlier this year in a move that also surprised many market watchers.

When a friend from M1 said that he would “re-surface” soon, I, like many watching the scene, had not expected him to turn up as the CEO of the “other” challenger to SingTel here in Singapore.

Still, when you think about it, this seems like a smart move for both StarHub and Neil. After all, M1 was the original challenger to SingTel in the partial liberalisation of the telecoms market here in the mid-1990s. When M1 burst onto the scene then, it quickly signed up mobile users who wanted an alternative to SingTel.

What’s one of the best ways to go one up on the competition? Hire their former CEO.

That’s just what StarHub announced today, when it said that its current CEO Terry Clontz will be retiring in January 2010, and former M1 CEO Neil Montefiore has surfaced to fill his shoes – pending regulatory approval.

Earlier this year on Feb 1, Neil stepped down from M1 and its then CFO Karen Kooi stood in as acting CEO, only to be confirmed as CEO a little more than two months later.

Now Neil, whom Terry has known “on a professional and personal level for ten years”, will take the reins of the number two telco in Singapore – a position which he probably wanted M1 to reach during his tenure.

Will this fuel further speculation of consolidation in the local telco scene? You bet. StarHub and M1 were already partners in the Infinity consortium, which put in a failed Netco bid in the Next Gen NBN project. And M1’s fixed broadband service essentially rides off StarHub’s cable modem infrastructure.

And if being pals doesn’t work out, StarHub can have the dirt on M1 – where they are good, and where they can hit it hard.

StarHub, 1 – M1, 0.