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.  …

  
(credit: StarHub)

Three years after he took over StarHub in a surprise move, company CEO Neil Montefiore will be retiring to make way for current chief operating officer, Tan Tong Hai, who takes over next month.

Montefiore took over from long-time StarHub CEO Terry Clontz in January 2010, in a high-profile move from rival M1. At M1, he had steered Singapore’s second mobile operator through the initial years of the country’s telecom liberalisation in the 1990s. …

M1 has responded to criticisms of its 3G disruption last week by saying that its contingency plans had kicked in to cut the downtime from a possible 12 to 16 weeks to less than three days.

The telecom operator yesterday detailed how the fault was created in the early hours of January 15, and claimed that the network was fully restored by 6pm on January 17.

It is keen to prove its case because an upcoming investigation by the government regulator could well determine if it would face a heavy penalty for one of the country’s most serious outages.
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M1 is giving its cellphone customers three days of free local calls, messages and data services from February 10 to 12, as it tries to assuage users aggrieved by one of Singapore’s most serious mobile network outages.

Apologising to its customers, M1 said in a press statement this afternoon that it had restored 3G services fully in the affected areas by yesterday.  …

As thousands of M1 subscribers find themselves suddenly cut off from phone calls, SMSes and e-mail these past couple of days, it is hardly surprising to see many taking to Facebook to hit out at their telecom operator.

That the most serious outage in recent memory was caused by M1′s vendors somehow setting off a water sprinkler at a network centre makes it even harder to accept. As a friend who works in the industry remarked, this looked like a rather “noob” mistake.
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Some M1 smartphone users were not able to go online with their 3G connections after a “power problem” disrupted the mobile data service early this morning in the country’s latest cellphone service outage.

The telecom operator put up a notice on its Facebook page at around 6am this morning, informing customers that some of them may be affected by the disruption. It also advised them to log on to its 2G network instead of 3G to continue using its services.

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(Source: IDA)

Singapore’s cellphone operators have fallen short in providing outdoor 3G coverage, particularly in housing estates, at outdoor recreation areas and along train routes above ground, tests by the government regulator have found.

The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) said today it will fine each operator $10,000, after signal readings around the island showed that they have failed to meet the 99 per cent coverage mandated from April this year.

In tests carried out in September, SingTel was found to offer 97.4 per cent coverage, while StarHub fared slightly worse with 97.2 per cent. The worst of the three was M1, which scored 94.6 per cent. …

(source: M1 Sitex brochure)

Prices of fibre broadband services in Singapore are back to their crazy lows at the ongoing Sitex show, as service providers engage in a frantic grab for customers at the start of the holiday season. …

And the price war rages between the telcos on fibre broadband prices.

Every quarter this year — if our quarterly tech fairs IT Show, PC Show and the recent COMEX are any indication — prices have fallen on fibre broadband packages.

M1 has just launched a promotion where their 200mbps fibre is retailing at S$49 per month, valid from now till early November. And there’s mobile broadband and home fixed voice service thrown in as well.

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