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. …