Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia are looking to run 4G services on airwaves that will be freed up when analog TV broadcasts are switched off in the region by 2020.

While the move is aimed at re-allocating precious bandwidth in the sky, the use of a common 700MHz frequency band in the region could enable travellers to easily “roam” with their smartphones and log on to local cellphone services to make calls or surf the Web. …

Source: Singapore White Spaces Pilot Group

Singapore may be taking a step closer to rolling out TV White Spaces, a new wireless technology that taps on the unused spectrum in broadcast TV frequencies, with new trials now being planned in four places.

The wireless technology will provide an Internet link to Sentosa, Gardens by the Bay, HDB estates and car dealership Eurokars Group, as the country seeks to find new use for old frequencies in its increasingly crowded airwaves. …

Another day, another network upgrade by a Singapore telecom operator.

There was a time when subscribers didn’t care how a network was run, as long as they could make calls or get their e-mails on the go. Today, however, with users often upset over clogged-up 3G networks and spotty 4G coverage, telcos seem to have upped their game publicly.

The latest news comes from StarHub today. It will blanket 95 per cent of the island with its 4G signals in the next four months, joining rivals M1 and SingTel in providing nationwide coverage for the fast mobile Internet service.
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Step into the PC Show this weekend, and you’d find fibre broadband prices that may make you wonder why you’ve been paying so much previously. The packages are not bad too, with various new TV options now being bundled together.

This is a huge change from just a few years ago, before fibre broadband was introduced. Then, only SingTel and StarHub played the field, with each competing on the freebies they gave out rather than on lower prices to attract users.

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StarHub’s post-paid mobile subscribers can now pay the same rate for data roaming when they surf on the phone in 20 overseas destinations, including the United States, Britain, Japan and Australia.

The telecom operator today unveiled a “single-rate” data roaming service that promises one price for the various countries that are included in the plan.

Users pay S$10 daily for each 50MB block of data, which may be enough for several e-mails, Facebook uploads and other small Internet transfers. …

M1 has become the latest service provider in Singapore to give home broadband users IPv6 Internet addresses, as part of a long-term plan to ensure that they can connect to websites moving to a new addressing system in future.

The IPv6 system allows trillions of computers, sensors and other Internet devices to each have an unique ID, enabling them to be more easily connected to one another.
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Users will spend US$65 billion on e-books, games and other content on their smartphones and tablets by 2016, up from this year’s US$40 billion, according to a research report released today.

The upsurge, according to Juniper Research, will be fueled by tablet users buying games, videos and e-books on their mobile devices, along with easier direct payment methods offered on smartphones by telecom operators. …

Broadband users moving in to new homes in Singapore in the years ahead can expect their premises to be already hooked up by a fibre optic point, in addition to the cable TV and phone jacks they get now.

This means they won’t have to arrange for their homes to be wired up separately by national contractor Opennet. That has been a source of irritation for many users, some of whom have had to wait several weeks to activate their link before their fibre broadband service can be turned on. …

Tablet and PC users who want a pay-as-you-use 4G connection can now buy prepaid cards from M1, which unveiled Singapore’s first such service earlier today.

An S$18 micro- or nano-SIM card provides up to 1GB of data for a month, which could translate into hundreds of webpages or just dozens of high-rez videos on YouTube, depending on the content consumed.  …

(source: StarHub)

StarHub is using Singapore’s fibre network to deliver its pay-TV services to offices, restaurants and pubs from March 18, as it seeks to cut down on current terrestrial broadcasts to such business customers. …