Some of the grumbling from SingTel in the past two days has been rather astonishing.

Right after being told to share its Barclays Premier League screenings with StarHub, it threatened to raise prices for football fans next season. It took things further yesterday, saying it might not be bidding for World Cup rights in 2014.

To which football fans should say “thank you”. Let someone else bid lower so viewers don’t have to pay so much. …

(credit: Ronnie Macdonald, Creative Commons)

Singapore’s football fans will be relieved the ref has got a crucial decision right on Wednesday evening.

Ignoring SingTel’s pleas of innocence, the country’s media regulator clearly told the team in red to show the next three seasons of the Barclays Premier League on rival services, such as StarHub’s cable TV, starting in August.

In a landmark ruling, it essentially laid out how it will deal with pay-TV operators that have somehow found a loophole in its efforts to open up the market and rid it of ruinous exclusive content contracts that have killed consumer choice for years.
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Some SingTel customers had “intermittent difficulties” sending SMSes late last evening but services are now back online, the telecom operator said on its Facebook page this morning.

The incident is the latest problem to plague Singapore’s telcos of late, despite several fines and warnings from the government regulator for poor services in the past year.

Yet, the funny thing is the comments that followed SingTel’s update. …

SingTel is going to lead a pilot project to explore ways to telecommute and have flexible work arrangements, with the hopes of drawing an estimated 326,000 “economically inactive” Singaporeans back into the workforce.

By sending a modest 30 employees from five companies back to their own homes, the study aims to assess the viability of telecommuting on a larger scale and identify the problems that may arise out of such a work culture. …

(credit: Ronnie Macdonald, Creative Commons)

Being a referee is never easy.

In the latest wrangle between SingTel and StarHub for English Premier League TV rights, the Media Development Authority (MDA) has found itself exactly in that tight spot.

But unlike a match where at least one set of fans will be pleased, a bad call by the officials here will have serious impact beyond just football rights. It will drastically drag back Singapore’s pay-TV industry, just as it is showing signs of opening up. …

Sometimes, the numbers tell the story best.

WhatsApp, that instant messaging service fast replacing SMS as the preferred way to text friends, is estimated to have as many as 200 to 300 million users worldwide. Today, there could be billions of WhatsApp messages sent every day, because back in 2011, a long time ago in cyberspace, the number had crossed a billion a day.

Now, compare that with the 1.78 billion SMSes sent in Singapore in December 2012. Yes, that’s an entire month.

If nothing else, that shows you the scale of things. It’s something that SingTel and StarHub will have to take heed, as they decide to take on the likes of WhatsApp by coming up with their own messaging apps.

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SingTel has been told to pay an unprecedented S$180,000 fine for problems in its TV service that cut off the last dramatic minutes of last season’s Barclays Premier League for about a third of its pay-TV customers.

Some 115,000 households had missed out on the few extraordinary minutes on May 13, 2012, when two goals for Manchester City in their last game clinched the title in one of the most thrilling endings to a season.

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If there’s one good thing about pay-TV competition in Singapore, it’s that both SingTel and StarHub show almost all channels for free during holidays, like this New Year weekend. …

(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. …

(credit: Markus Unger, Creative Commons)

Up in the middle of the night to watch a Champions League match, some SingTel subscribers must have been rubbing their eyes in disbelief when they found themselves cut off from the live broadcasts this season.

They will have to pay S$10 more a month, the pay-TV operator later clarified, because the cost of sports programming has risen and it could no longer bundle the Champions League matches with the Barclays Premier League shows for free.

Considering how football broadcast rights have cost more everywhere, that could hardly be surprising.

What’s worrying, though, is that SingTel may be starting to feel the pinch of paying millions of dollars in its previous costly bid three years ago – and transfering that cost to viewers. 
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