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. …

What’s the next-gen broadband network all about? What can it do for me?

Those questions were topmost on the minds of some home owners who have so far rejected a free offer to hook up to Singapore’s ultra-fast fibre optic broadband network, according to the government agency in charge of rolling it out.

“Some people don’t even know what’s NBN (next-gen broadband network), they see the letter (of offer) and they throw the letter away,” said Assistant CEO for the Infocomm Development Authority, Khoong Hock Yun, at a media briefing here at CommunicAsia. …

One piece of good news from this morning’s CommunicAsia announcements is that ultra-fast broadband is coming to homes in Singapore via a fibre optic network as soon as September.

This means you have to have your house or apartment wired up with these new cables. You can check here by typing in your postal code at the website of Opennet, the company tasked with rolling it out.

Don’t go to the www.opennet.com.sg URL that the official press releases point you to, because the opening page has problems loading on many browsers. Go instead to rollout.opennet.com.sg.

Well, I checked my place in Upper Serangoon and I should have fibre installed as early as Oct 2009. Hooray!

UPDATE: The rollout date is only for laying the fibre optic cable to your home, the Opennet folks have clarified at a press conference here. Nucleus Connect, the OpCo, will “light up” the fibre optics” and enable a broadband service later. I sense some confusion coming along…