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.

It also offered higher plans, from S$82.18 for a 150Mbps plan up to a crazy S$395.90 for a 1Gbps service, which I’m sure home data centre users will be really interested in. For a comparison with other services unveiled this week, there’s more info here.

Like M1, StarHub is offering its cable customers a three-month trial of its new fibre broadband services, called MaxInfinity. Users can sign up at the Comex show this weekend, or go to a StarHub site (when it’s up in a short while).

In addition to the new plans, StarHub also said that its old cable modem services, which now look unattractive because of their high prices.

Make no mistake about it, the broadband market has become more competitive, with better deals out in just a few short days. It’d be interesting to see the action at this weekend’s Comex show.

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.

After years of being tied to either StarHub or SingTel – other operators could not price things lower because they were wholesaling from the duopolies – users can actually see some real choices for their high-speed links at home.

Whether you think you will use all that speed, or if the speed actually makes a difference to the way your use the Net, the benefits are real. Prices are expected to eventually fall even for low-end plans.

Already, we have seen top-end plans – the previous fastest 100Mbps cable modem plan from StarHub – being made unattractive by cheaper and faster offerings on the new network. Prices for slower services are expected to follow suit, as more higher-speed offerings come to market and exert pressure on prices.

Here’s a slice of what we have seen from the five operators rolling out fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) services so far for consumers. At the moment, it’s hard to always get apples-to-apples comparison, because operators are offering services at several different speeds.

SingTel also offers a 200Mbps service for about S$100 (with mio TV programme bundles). Meanwhile, M1 has a 1,000Mbps service, which comes with a crazy S$399 monthly price tag. Strictly for those running a data centre at home!

UPDATE: StarHub has also launched its fibre-based services, ranging from 100Mbps to 1Gbps. It is more expensive than M1 at the 100Mbps level, and has a 1Gbps home plan at S$395.90.

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.

The physical network, built currently by Opennet, is expected to cover 60 per cent of Singapore by end 2010. It is expected to hook up 95 per cent of premises here by mid-2012.

Storrie said his company has been approached by a number of operators interested to hook up to the new network, which is sold based on open prices. This challenges the “duopoly” pricing offered by StarHub and SingTel, which used to own most of the telecom infrastructure in Singapore.

Despite the benefits, for now, coverage seems to be the biggest obstacle to more companies coming onboard, said Storrie.

“Overseas operators have said: ‘We like your offer, we’ll be back, when there’s more coverage,” he said, at the event today. He added that he expects “another five” RSPs coming onboard by the end of the year, without naming them.

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.

This appears to be targeted at StarHub’s fastest cable modem service – rated at 100Mbps download, 10Mbps upload, and costing S$86.88.

For true speedsters, SingTel’s top-end FTTH consumer plans offer download speeds of up to 200Mbps (100Mbps upload, 25Mbps international) and costs from S$95.90, depending on the mioTV bundle you buy from SingTel.

Besides the better download speeds, this is also the first time a Singapore broadband service has listed “international” bandwidth as part of the specs. Previously, international bandwidth has been on a “best effort” basis, thus users here who surf 70 per cent of the time to overseas sites often feel the lag despite signing up for the fastest plans here.

To be sure, these are still early days yet, as the prices are still some way off what consumers elsewhere get. In Hong Kong, the usual benchmark to which Singapore’s market is compared, a 1,000Mbps service can be as low as HK$199 (S$34) a month.

But the competition is expected to get hotter, as Singapore marks a major milestone in its broadband market development. From the bad old days of SingaporeOne, where prices were high and services plagued with slow speeds, the country’s service providers now have the ability to offer (in future) services as fast as what leading countries such as South Korea and Hong Kong do.

More importantly, for consumers, a new level of competition is set to force older broadband services to be cheaper, as SingTel’s new FTTH services now demonstrate.

The market is set for a shakeup. In the coming days, StarHub is expected to announce its suite of services and possibly new prices. Other telcos, such as M1, are also primed to leverage on the “open” national network to offer faster broadband services. What this boils down to is more and better choices.

(UPDATE: SuperInternet and LGA, which offer telephony and data centre services to many SMEs here, have also signed up to sell fibre-based broadband services, so that’s a boon to corporate users).

Down the road, the hope is that the new network can level the playing field, so a whole host of new service providers can offer broadband bundles – whether this be with games or pay-TV – customised to users’ preferences.

More importantly, when current exclusive pay-TV contracts end in the coming months and years, perhaps users may even get to watch the Barclays Premier League with a service provider of our choosing, as it is streamed over this common fibre optic network that all new ultra-fast broadband services are based on.

UPDATE: Check out the other operators’ fibre broadband offerings here.

You could try to build a “private cloud“, though the term could be misleading, depending on your definition of cloud computing.

In May, Amazon Web Services senior vice president Andy Jassy noted that private clouds usually incur “very high fixed cost and lack the benefits of the cloud. Companies still own all the capital expenditure, data centers, servers; it’s not pay as you go and it’s not truly elastic on the company level because you still own and manage the infrastructure by yourself.”

To many large organizations, the idea of a private cloud is not new. If you are running a data center and providing business units with IT services on a charge-back basis and with predefined service levels, you are already doing cloud computing to some degree. The difference now is, you get to do that more efficiently through server consolidation, and with the help of technologies such as virtualization.

Enterprise IT vendors are now capitalizing on this cloud wave by offering cloud products and services on two levels. The first, of course, is to offer a public cloud service that runs applications such as CRM packages in the case of Salesforce.com, or sell infrastructure components and services that companies need to run private clouds.

In fact, when vendors talk about private cloud offerings, they are mostly referring to a set of data center technologies that let you run your computing infrastructure more efficiently and with greater flexibility than before.

These data centers may not necessarily be used to power a private cloud. In some cases, they could just operate like a server farm built for scientific data modeling or large-scale number crunching. The keyword here is on-demand, where the combination of technologies allows you to match the use of IT resources to your workloads.

Ultimately, you still own and manage the infrastructure in a private cloud. While you may enjoy the benefits of cloud concepts like elasticity in a private cloud, the fundamental proposition of cloud computing – no capital investment and pricing benefits from large economies of scale – is still missing.

Virtual Computing Environment’s Vblock
I will refrain from using the “cloud” moniker when referring to Vblock, a set of data center technologies targeted at companies interested in building private clouds that EMC showcased to journalists and analysts at the Shanghai World Expo this week.

According to Par Botes, CTO at EMC Asia-Pacific, each Vblock is essentially an infrastructure package comprising Cisco UCS servers and network switches, EMC’s storage systems and VMware’s virtualisation software that runs virtual machines.

This stack of integrated products from Cisco, EMC and VMware is a cumulation of efforts by all three vendors in the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition to reduce the cost and complexity of assembling a set of computing, storage and network equipment used in data centers. By using Vblock as the underlying infrastructure unit, Par said companies do not need to undertake extensive testing to integrate various data center components. In one customer example, the time it takes to deploy new hardware has also been reduced by as much as 40 percent.

The move toward the Vblock as the baseline infrastructure unit that can run hundreds or thousands of virtual machines heralds a shift in how data centers are run and managed. Traditionally in any IT set up, you typically have professionals specializing in various domains such as networking, applications and systems administration. And because IT organizations also mirror these functional groups, there is likely to be employee tension arising in companies moving toward virtualized data centers.

The Vblock also marks a heightened emphasis by vendors on delivering entire IT stacks comprising a suite of hardware and/or software to reduce IT complexity. Virtualisation has by and large facilitated and accelerated this trend by decoupling the link between hardware and software that has partly contributed to this complexity.

At the same time, virtualisation has also eroded the features that may have differentiated one network switch, operating system or server from another. Coalitions such as the VCE may be seen as an attempt to restore some of those, at least by ensuring things work well across different products sold by members in the same alliance.

The Vblock on its own is a compelling proposition for companies who are looking for ways to reduce infrastructure complexities. The use of the term private cloud by the VCE to market the product is not only unnecessary, it further obfuscates the dialog on what cloud computing really means.

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.

The Q1 2011 date released on a Motorola website means it will be as long as a year after users here first got their hands on their Milestones, which was launched in Singapore by StarHub in March 2010.

No reason was given by Motorola for the delay between the American Droid update and the Milestone update. And it must be puzzling to users here because Motorola has not done much customisation to the Android OS, which means it would not be as hard to update its phones as rival phone makers which have to tweak their updates to fit their software customisations.

If it’s any consolation, at least it looks likely that Singapore users will get the update. Motorola is still considering whether to update the Milestone in China at all. The same goes for Android 2.1 updates for Dext and BackFlip in Asia-Pacific.

One of the most popular Android handsets here, the Milestone won over users with its large screen and slide-out keyboard. It was also offered at low cost – free with some data plans – when StarHub launched the phone.

We’re guessing that many users might just dump their Milestones while waiting for the update and instead go for a newer phone. Alternatively, they may run their own cracked Android 2.2 updates from sites such as XDA.

First unveiled at CES 2010, the Iomega iConnect is a NAS device targeted at consumers and SOHO users with its simple set-up process that quickly connects USB drives and printers to a home network for file and print sharing.

This S$163 NAS slab is possibly one of the thinnest out there, and comes with four USB ports (three in front and one behind) for hooking up USB drives and printers that can be shared among the users on your home network. While the iConnect looks sleek, the whole set-up doesn’t look that great once you have USB cables running all over the device.

At the back of the device lies a LAN port for you to connect the NAS slab to a router during initial set-up. Subsequently, the iConnect can be configured to hook up to your wireless network with its built-in Wi-Fi radio. There is also a file transfer button in front that lets you copy files from one USB drive to another for back-up.

Setting up the device was easy. After plugging a 320GB Iomega eGo USB drive and a Brother HL-2140 laser printer into the iConnect, I popped in the set-up CD to install the Iomega Storage Manager software which immediately detected the USB drive and made it available for use through My Computer in Windows. Network printing can also be easily set up in Windows by searching the network for available printers and installing the right printer driver from the default list in Windows, or from your printer’s installation disc.

If you have a Linux box hooked up to your network, USB drives on the iConnect will also show up automatically as one of your network drives if Samba Windows file sharing is installed. Using the networked Brother laser printer in Ubuntu Linux was fuss-free too. After searching for the printer on the network, just pick the right printer driver and I was ready to start printing over the network from Linux.

On a Mac, the contents of my shared USB drive shows up as a drive icon on the desktop once it’s located from the network through Finder. Network printing can also be set up through Bonjour in Mac OS X.

Remote access
Besides file and printing sharing over your local network, you can also set up the iConnect to provide remote access to the same USB drives.

First, you need to sign up for a dynamic DNS service from TZO DNS (though the iConnect admin interface) that will give you a URL for accessing your USB drives. It also requires users to understand the basics of port forwarding which needs to be configured on a router before remote access will work. While Iomega provides instructions on how to do this – right down to specific steps for various router brands – things might get confusing for newbies who will need to tinker with their routers for the first time.

Once remote access is set up, you can access and upload files from anywhere outside your home network However, users can only upload or download files one at a time through the iConnect Web interface. Perhaps Iomega could find a way to let users map their shared network drives on remote machines for who need to work with large number of files.

The bottom line is this: the Iomega iConnect performs as promised, offering an entry level NAS solution for home and SOHO users who wish to “network-enable” their USB drives and printers – but don’t expect its performance to match that of full-sized NAS servers in disk speeds. Also, be prepared to pay US$10 a year to retain your domain name for remote access after the first year.

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).

It’s almost like being caught in a time warp when looking at the C6′s uninspiring 3.2-inch screen that sports 640 x 360 pixels. Compare that to the cheaper Samsung Jet (S$48 with two-year plan at M1), that comes a bright AMOLED screen with 800 x 480 sharpness.

Besides the display, the next most awkward thing I find about the Nokia C6 is its touch-screen. The resistive touch-screen is nowhere as sensitive as what you will get at even competitively-priced, low-cost phones, whether in the shape of the Jet or Sony Ericsson’s Android-powered X10 mini (S$68, with two-year plan at M1) or X10 mini Pro (S$148, with two-year plan at M1).

Sony Ericsson’s little wonders are not only cheap and fast, but can let you tap on to thousands of Android apps that run smoothly on-screen – something that the C6 struggles to do, even with apps that come pre-installed, like Ovi Maps.

When I try firing up an application on the C6, I often find myself tapping several times in frustration to get things going. And let’s not even go into the scrolling function, which will have you wondering why things are not moving smoothly at all.

If the C6 was launched two years ago, or hey, even a year ago, you can still say the hardware design is great and that the keyboard, with its pop-up keys, is a really practical tool. But we’ve seen this design in previous Nokias, and the C6 shows just how far the company is lagging behind its rivals as it transitions from its terribly outdated and laggy Symbian OS to the upcoming MeeGo.

For an example, I only have to launch the C6′s Ovi Maps, which takes several seconds to load, compared to Google Maps which loads in an instant.

Meanwhile, despite e-mail being one of its better features, a message over Gmail didn’t even load at all on the C6, even after I spent an entire minute waiting for it. All these tests were conducted over Wi-Fi, so as not to have a slow 3G connection cause a bottleneck.

The C6′s Internet browser, surprisingly, can play YouTube videos, thanks to Flash Lite. But more importantly, because of the snail-paced Symbian OS and hardware, you only have to try navigating on the page a little to see how laggy things turn out.

That’s not to mention that the browser takes a long time – more than twice as long as a top-end Nexus One, just for comparison – to load webpages. Because the C6′s screen is not that responsive, scrolling through a page once again becomes a great test of  patience if you have ever used an iPhone or Android phone.

The only good thing I can say about the C6 is what I’ve said before about older Nokia phones – the easy e-mail setup. All I have to do to get my Gmail running on the device is to key in my e-mail address and password. The e-mail setup even has settings for SingNet mail, which many users in Singapore still use as an auxiliary inbox.

Unfortunately, the C6 is just simply outdated. In my mind, the worst offenders are the inadequate hardware, which results in apps running sluggishly, and the outdated apps themselves, like Facebook which requires you to open up an entire page to view comments to a posting, instead of just popping up the comments on the same page, as with Android.

With all these problems in mind, I find it hard to recommend the Nokia C6, despite its low cost. Even at S$98 (with a two-year plan), it is over-priced, for what appears like a two-year-old design.

Besides the Samsung Jet and Sony Ericsson Xperias at the M1 store, better deals can be had at StarHub, with the full-featured HTC Legend  and HTC Wildfire (both about S$50, with comparative two-year plans).

Oracle claims that Google has been aware of Sun’s patent portfolio, including the patents at issue, since the middle of this decade, when Google hired certain former Sun Java engineers.

The lawsuit leads one to question the intentions of Oracle’s latest lawsuit and its commitment to open source. Java has been covered by the open source General Public License since 2006, way before Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems was completed in January 2010.

Oracle claims that Google’s Android competes with Oracle’s Java as an operating system software platform for cellular telephones and other mobile devices.

“The Android operating system software stack consists of Java applications running on a Java-based object-oriented application framework, and core libraries running on a “Dalvik” virtual machine (VM) that features just-in-time (JIT) compilation. Google actively distributes Android (including without limitation the Dalvik VM and the Android software development kit) and promotes its use by manufacturers of products and applications.

“By purposefully and voluntarily distributing one or more of its infringing products and services, Google has injured Oracle America and is thus liable to Oracle America for infringement of the patents at issue,” Oracle said in its filing with the Northern District Court of California.

Oracle’s financial gains from this lawsuit are obviously huge, thanks to surging sales of Android devices. While it’s probable that talks between the two tech giants broke down, leading Oracle to pull punches against the world’s favorite search engine, Oracle seems to have veered away from Sun’s commitment to foster innovation through open source Java in a bid to monetize the Java platform more aggressively than Sun ever did.

On Friday, Google called the Oracle lawsuit a baseless one, adding that “open-source Java community goes beyond any one corporation and works every day to make the web a better place. We will strongly defend open-source standards and will continue to work with the industry to develop the Android platform.”

It is not in Oracle’s interest to upset the Java ecosystem, especially with the strides that Java — through Android — has made in the mobile space in recent years. Neither does it want mobile developers to ditch the platform for something else. With this lawsuit against Google, Oracle is walking on a tight rope, one that it needs to tread carefully.

Firstly, below are some YouTube videos that the scrappy Gothere guys have put up on the Interwebs to explain what their app is about:

Basically it’s a front end client app on iPhone that extends their already popular Gothere.sg site. I’m don’t own an iPhone (I have a HTC Desire and am on the Android platform), but in the preview session that Junhan demoed the app to me and a few other work colleagues on the iPhone 4, I found the app to be excellent.

Everything that I liked about Gothere.sg — various driving public transport suggestions + estimated costs (e.g. avoiding ERP gantrys), trip summaries, smart autocompletion of search locations, etc. — had been shrunk down into one portable app. And the best thing is that the price point of S$1.99 for the app is something that is very affordable.

Clouds on the horizon

And now for the sad part: The Gothere folks are only using this iPhone app to defray their server costs to keep the site up and running. With about 100,000 page views per day, their server costs do cost a bit. Plus the Gothere app is very localized to the Singapore market, which is not huge (about 400,000 iPhone users), and as a likely one-off purchase, it wouldn’t be a huge long term revenue.

Some of the founders of Gothere have now transitioned to a totally new business in developing applications for the iPhone platform.

“We need to survive,” said Junhan ruefully when I asked about their situation and their move from the mapping business to iPhone apps.

I’ve always been an unabashed fan as I like the genuine and scrappy folks at Gothere, but their lack of a viable business model worried me in the past.

And unfortunately, ever since big behemoths like Google maps entered Singapore, it has made the mapping business a really hard one to compete in. It’s an inherently unfair fight of four guys vs. a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Well at least the Gothere iPhone app seems to be a good idea, and there seems to be a decent amount of buzz in the social media space about their app. Hopefully it should bring in some revenue for the folks who worked on Gothere.sg for so long. They deserve it.