When thin, fragile-looking cables are being laid in thousands of drains, risers and other ducts in Singapore for its fibre broadband network at such pace, you expect the occasional hiccup.

Who would blame Opennet, the contractor laying the cables to 95 per cent of the island, if once in a while a cable or two are not patched correctly?

Certainly, with fibre broadband prices at a low and a variety of options for savvy Net users, Singapore consumers never had it so good before. Intense competition has brought a 100Mbps fibre service to under S$50 and there are now services catering to gamers and video buffs.

Yet, a number of issues with Opennet now threaten to spoil the experience for users. And if not tackled, they could put the brakes on the competition that has benefited the newly-opened up market. …

There’s now a way to watch the latest American TV drama serials like Glee cheaply and easily, by signing up for a fibre broadband service that lets users Singapore log on to video-on-demand services like Hulu and Netflix that are 0nly offered in the United States.

Internet service provider ViewQwest is offering its broadband services with a low-cost VPN (virtual private networking) option that enables Singapore users to easily connect to these United States-based services. …

The newly-opened up broadband market in Singapore has seen the entry of new players such as MyRepublic, which promises to cater to niche markets such as gamers with its differentiated fibre broadband offerings.

Just how do these smaller players get their game going and can they continue to prosper as the Big Three telcos in Singapore slash prices in an all-out fibre broadband war?

In this month’s Q&A, we speak to Malcolm Rodrigues, the CEO and co-founder of MyRepublic, the new kid on the block in the broadband market, for his views. …

After years of complaining about slow connections, Singapore’s broadband users can now join a study that uses their actual day-to-day experience to offer a clear snapshot of just how fast their Internet service is.

One of the long-standing problems here is that much of the content that users access is based overseas, and links to these sites seldom reach the advertised speeds, say, 100Mbps, that service providers promise. Now, instead of second-guessing or asking for advice from strangers in a forum, users can get a better sense of the actual speeds from real users’ feedback.

Some 900 volunteers are now sought to participate in a study conducted by well-known research firm SamKnows, which has carried out similar research in Europe and the United States. Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) is backing this survey in Singapore.

While the IDA has been publishing monthly throughput results based on its own tests, the new tests will have users collecting the information from their homes. This promises a more realistic look at how fast things are in the real world. …

The rapidly heating up broadband wars in Singapore crossed an important mark this week, when the Big Three telcos all dropped prices for the benchmark 100Mbps service under S$50 a month.

SingTel, StarHub and M1 began a new phase of competition at the IT Show running at Suntec City, hoping to lock in as many subscribers as possible as the country’s next-gen fibre network nears completion in June this year.
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Yet another service provider has come up with fibre broadband plans without the usual two-year lock-in period, in the latest sign of competition heating up in Singapore.

ViewQwest today said it would sell its high-end plans without having users sign a contract that ties them down. If they pay S$95.95 a month for a 200Mbps plan – or other more expensive plans – they can choose to switch to another telco any time they wish, according to a release the company sent out this afternoon.
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The fibre optic cable may have reached your home, but when you try signing up for one of those speedy fibre broadband services that your friends have been talking about, you are told to wait several weeks or even months for the link to be “turned on”. The reason: the company rolling out the fibre can’t cope.

Though Opennet is meeting its deadline to connect up 95 per cent of Singapore by mid-2012 – it was at 86 per cent in January – it is finding it hard to keep up with the demand of customers signing up en masse during the quarterly IT bazaars, where prices for these services are often slashed.

Opennet may have the cable hooked up to homes and offices, but it still has to “turn on” or activate the switches at the base of a high-rise building, for example, to send the data through.

And that is the problem that the government regulator now wants to solve by making Opennet turn on more connections each month. Yesterday, it proposed a number of changes for Opennet, in a move that could accelerate the takeup of these faster and often cheaper broadband services. …

If you are signing up or renewing a broadband, mobile or pay-TV service these days, the questions you face can sometimes be rather daunting, given big changes – mostly positive – that have shaken up the telecom market in the past few years.

Who has the best broadband deals in Singapore? Who has the best bundled “triple play” deals with all three services packaged nicely and billed in a single envelop? And, of course, how do I switch all my plans over to one operator?

Answer these questions well and you could be on the way to substantial savings by buying wisely and also enjoy the convenience of having fewer bills from so many operators.

About four years ago, I’d have told you, if you watch live football, the choice was simple: go for StarHub, because it had the fastest (cable modem) broadband, per-second billing for its mobile services and of course, the crown jewel – English Premier League (EPL) on its cable TV channels.

But things have changed so much in the past few years that consumers are sometimes spoilt, perhaps even confused with choice.

Fibre broadband has truly given users better deals – S$39 a month for an unheard of 100Mbps, for starters. The upcoming three seasons of the EPL could well be shown on both SingTel and StarHub, and possibly even M1, thanks to Singapore’s new pay-TV rules. And let’s not forget number portability, which lets you keep your mobile number while switching telcos.

With so many changes in the past few years and more upcoming, what should you be aware of when you next sign up for those two-year contracts? Here’s a little guide, gleaned from my own experience buying these services. …

Consumers signing up for fibre broadband services in Singapore got one more alternative to the big three of SingTel, StarHub and M1 earlier this week, with the entry of MyRepublic, an upstart that promises to sell services based on what users do online, instead of  simply promising top speeds.

A S$69-a-month package, for example, will target gamers and offer a “low latency experience” for those who connect frequently to, say, the World of Warcraft servers worldwide to get their role-playing game fix.

The new service provider also offers online tutorials and exam preparation tools for Primary 1 to 6 as part of its S$89“Tutor” fibre broadband package, to attract parents who want their kids to go beyond the standard curriculum in school.  …

Users of M1′s fibre broadband services are having difficulty viewing websites hosted locally in Singapore today, due to a yet unresolved network problem.

Since this afternoon, many users have been unable to access local sites, including M1′s own website, the Singapore government’s websites as well as other sites that may be cached locally to cater to users here. Some sites hosted overseas, such as Facebook or YouTube, however, remain accessible. …