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.

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.

To address this, he told reporters that the agency has been using traditional media to reach out to users to explain the benefits of the new network, which is being built by Opennet. The company is offering to install for free a fibre link to homes, which is expected to offer 1Gbps and faster for future services such as tele-medicine.

So far, 35 per cent of Singapore has been hooked up to the speedy network, well on time for the target of reaching 60 per cent of homes here by the end of 2010, and 95 per cent by June 2012, says IDA. However, when asked, executives here did not say what the takeup rate was for homes offered the free fibre installation.

The NBN was expected to go commercial in the first half of this year, but this has so far been limited to a handful of co-location services offered by Nucleus Connect, the OpCo or operating company for the Singapore NBN.

As you may have heard, some 95 per cent of Singapore is being wired up with fibre optic cables for the country’s next-generation broadband network, which promises an almost unlimited speed boost over existing SingTel’s copper-line phone system and StarHub’s HFC (hybrid fibre coaxial) network.

But little has been said about what this cable laying project means to the average Joe.

Earlier this week, OpenNet, the consortium tasked with wiring up Singapore, gave the media a glimpse of how things will pan out. The quick takeaway is that it is on-schedule, and will be sending letters to residents in selected areas to inform them that contractors would be coming to their homes to hook up the new cables.

Here are some things you, the home owner and tech goondu, should be aware of.

1. It’s just the cable, stupid
First, to clarify things, what OpenNet (the “NetCo” in this broadband project) is doing is simply laying the fibre optic cable to your home, much like StarHub did with its cable TV network more than a decade ago. The difference this time: another company called the “OpCo” – Nucleus Connect – will have to “light up” the cables or basically enable the cables to do what they are supposed to do. More on this later.

Some lucky folks will get commercial services as early as the first half of next year, according to the Singapore authorities. But for now, the excitement will be confined to seeing a group of contractors come to install a new cable, which will be inactive for a while until another bunch of folks come to hook up additional gear to “light it up”.

When the OpenNet folks – look out for them in purple polo shirts – come knocking, they will bring the fibre optic cable inside your home and hook this up to a wall socket of sorts. Just think of it as another cable point next to your phone and cable TV sockets. This installation is free for most people – the exception being those who live in a big bungalow that requires more than 15 metres of fibre optic cables to wire up.

Just like StarHub’s cable TV rollout, this free offer to wire up is for one-time only. Should you reject it, you will have to pay S$220 or more when you change your mind later, after seeing your neighbour download his pirated movies 10 times faster than you.

2. Things might not be pretty
Singapore is such a beautiful city because most of its cables are hidden underground and this continues to be the case for the next-generation broadband network.

At Cantonment Drive, where the first flats are being wired up, OpenNet showed reporters how it will be using underground ducts provided by SingTel (one of its shareholders) to run cables all over Singapore – and all the way to the foot of your high-rise HDB flat – without having to dig up any ground.

From here, the fibre optic cables run up a riser and exits on every floor through the common corridor – think of the riser as a lift shaft for cables.

Up to here, the cables are still well-concealed. But this is where the difficulty begins. In some HDB blocks with ceilings that conceal existing wiring, like the Cantonment Drive flat that we were brought to, the new fibre optic cables have to be run along the corridor with rather ugly white plastic trunking. The trunking’s okay for one apartment, but when several apartments are hooked up with the trunking on each floor, it stands out.

To be honest, this is still ways neater than the bare wires you see hanging overhead in some other cities. But being the house-proud people that Singaporeans are, some residents will surely complain.

The irony is, if your estate is older (say, over 10 years old), OpenNet says you should already have some sort of ugly plastic trunking for existing cables. In this case, the new cables can just fit in there without making your corridor any uglier!

The same applies for running the cable inside your home as well. If you already have ugly plastic trunking all over your walls, then the contractor only needs to open up the trunking and stuff the new cable inside.

Unfortunately, if your apartment is less than five years old, you may already have cable points, phone sockets and network points nicely concealed and flushed against a wall. Now, you have to decide if you want ugly white trunking running across your living room.

When I put this to the folks from OpenNet and IDA (the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore), they said it was sometimes possible to squeeze the very thin fibre optic cables through existing concealed trunking.

On your common corridor, this means it can run inside the ceiling with the rest of the phone and StarHub cables. Similarly, if your home is hooked up with cables hidden inside the walls, OpenNet says there is a way to slip the new cable into the existing concealed trunking and have it exit through your existing phone or cable point.

The cable layers say this is done with a technique that uses “low-friction” cables that be slid through already tight trunking. But even they admit that this technique doesn’t work all the time, as was the case with the Cantonment Drive flats, so you just have to keep your fingers crossed.

3. Having more gear
Once the OpenNet guys are done with the cabling, you’ll need an OpCo (so far, there’s only one – the StarHub-owned Nucleus Connect) to come and hook up what is called an ONT (Optical Network Terminal).

This is like an additional modem of sorts, to the layman, as it will hook up the fibre optic cable from your new wall jack to your home network.

This ONT will come with several ports (IDA’s sample had four), which will allow several RSPs (retail service providers) like StarHub, SingTel and whoever wants to sell ultra-fast broadband here to hook up their set-top boxes or modems. Yes, one more modem compared to now.

So, if you have a cable/ADSL modem and a router now, in future, you’ll have an ONT plus a modem plus a router. And for now, I’m still not sure if you’ll connect an HDTV set-top box to an ONT or to an RSP’s modem.

To be fair, all of this is still new. Thus, there are bound to be some teething pains, some of which will be borne by early adopters.

Just as the first ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) users in Singapore in the 1990s were basically crash-test dummies for the bug-ridden SingTel Magix and its equipment vendor Alcatel, there will be goondus like me who will clamour to be the first on fibre and help service providers sort out the bugs!

I only hope there is a sustained test period – as StarHub did with its years-long cable modem trial before the commercial rollout – to iron out the bugs before unleashing FTTH (fibre-to-the-home) services on a hopeful public. What we don’t need is SingTel Magix redux.

UPDATE: IDA has set up a small site showing people what to expect with the FTTH rollout. Unfortunately, I don’t know why it still envisions slow powerline and phone line networking for your internal home network – these will become bottlenecks for an ultra-fast network promising 1Gbps.

I’ll have more about Singapore’s next-gen broadband rollout in an upcoming issue of Digital Life, which comes free on Wednesdays with The Straits Times.

The country’s telecom regulator,the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), had just awarded the tender for the network’s OpCo (operating company) to StarHub months ago, and the NetCo contract to SingTel late last year.

However, the multi-billion dollar project seems to be picking up fast, with commercial services coming to some users in less than a year, according to Singapore’s Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, Lui Tuck Yew, at the opening of the imbX show here.

By next year, the fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network will cover 60 per cent of homes and offices. This suggests that the project is well ahead of the initial target of covering the island by 2012.

Fibre optic cables are now being deployed in buildings, said the IDA at a press conference here, and these cables will be laid into homes from September. So home owners should get ready for some disruption, just like when StarHub laid its cable network in the past.