If you don’t want the bundled mio TV or StarHub cable when you sign up for fibre broadband in Singapore, there’s a new online TV offering from upstart challenger Viewqwest this week – the popular PPTV online TV service from China.

Folks who sign up for Viewqwest’s Freedom VPN plan will get “VIP access” to the PPTV service, which streams thousands of popular Asian drama serials and some Hollywood movies. …

(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. …

If you have ever wondered why it usually costs nothing to send an e-mail but so much more to make a phone call while overseas, you will have found that the cost has nothing to do with the distance or effort required to deliver things.

Rather, it’s the different charging models that have been developed – and kept – over the years by powerful companies, like telecom operators which own the wires underneath the ground and sea. Fortunately, of late, so-called over-the-top services like Skype, which use the Internet to bypass these expensive business models, have come to spoil the market.

In the pay-TV arena, the same is happening. Well, at least in the United States, where services such as Netflix and Hulu are offering thousands of movies and TV shows to viewers for a flat under-US$10 monthly fee. That has made many couch potatoes there “cut the cord” to their pay-TV operators.

Increasingly, many broadband users in Singapore are also hooking up to these services even though they are only available to folks in the US. It’s simple: you just trick them into believing that you’re in the US.

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Banners at Comex 2012 for SingTel and M1

This year at Comex 2012 it is a marketing battle between the red and yellow, with a slice of purple thrown in.

One of the bigger IT fairs held at Suntec City, Comex 2012 traditionally has the three big telcos — StarHub (green), SingTel (red) and M1 (yellow) — duking it out. Promoters in all three colours will typically be aggressively enticing visitors to visit their booths.

However this year it seems that StarHub has taken a smaller role in the marketing battle compared with last year.

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When M1 put up those banners for S$39-a-month fibre broadband services last week at the PC Show, its rivals must have cursed as much as consumers cheered for a “market spoiling” deal that once again proved how cheap high-speed Internet services have become in Singapore.

A laggard in broadband services and their takeup just a few years ago, Singapore is now one of the world’s leading fibre broadband capitals for not just the variety and low cost of offerings but also the way the market has been regulated.

The numbers don’t lie. At each quarterly computer bazaar, more than 3,000 users sign up for these fibre broadband services that promise faster speeds at cheaper prices.

The contractor rolling out the network, Opennet, cannot cope with the demand. As some 95 per cent of the island gets hooked up next month, the takeup for such services is only going to accelerate.

Yet, there is much to improve. If the first wave in the past two years is about takeup, then the next one has to be about improving the experience. Old ways of doing things need to go out of the window to give users the full improvements of fibre broadband.

Here are a few changes that will help. …

Braving the crowds and jams this weekend at PC Show 2012 for a quick bargain?

Techgoondu went through the floors this afternoon to bring you some interesting deals worth checking out. From desktop PCs to broadband plans, there’s a wide range of bargains to look out for at Suntec City. …

The fibre broadband wars for this week’s computer bazaar have begun with ViewQwest offering a new service that promises smooth gameplay through low latency connections to game servers worldwide.

The service, called FiberNet Raptor, is the first in Singapore to claim a low latency of less than 200 milliseconds for online games such as Diablio III. Such connections mean that characters in an online game don’t freeze up and gameplay doesn’t end up jerky. …

There’s now a way to watch the latest American TV drama serials like Glee cheaply and easily, by signing up for a fibre broadband service that lets users Singapore log on to video-on-demand services like Hulu and Netflix that are 0nly offered in the United States.

Internet service provider ViewQwest is offering its broadband services with a low-cost VPN (virtual private networking) option that enables Singapore users to easily connect to these United States-based services. …

After years of complaining about slow connections, Singapore’s broadband users can now join a study that uses their actual day-to-day experience to offer a clear snapshot of just how fast their Internet service is.

One of the long-standing problems here is that much of the content that users access is based overseas, and links to these sites seldom reach the advertised speeds, say, 100Mbps, that service providers promise. Now, instead of second-guessing or asking for advice from strangers in a forum, users can get a better sense of the actual speeds from real users’ feedback.

Some 900 volunteers are now sought to participate in a study conducted by well-known research firm SamKnows, which has carried out similar research in Europe and the United States. Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) is backing this survey in Singapore.

While the IDA has been publishing monthly throughput results based on its own tests, the new tests will have users collecting the information from their homes. This promises a more realistic look at how fast things are in the real world. …

Yet another service provider has come up with fibre broadband plans without the usual two-year lock-in period, in the latest sign of competition heating up in Singapore.

ViewQwest today said it would sell its high-end plans without having users sign a contract that ties them down. If they pay S$95.95 a month for a 200Mbps plan – or other more expensive plans – they can choose to switch to another telco any time they wish, according to a release the company sent out this afternoon.
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