t e c h i e - t a l k s ::: technology at its best

We brought you a first look into Singapore’s Next Generation Broad-band Network (NGNBN) a few years back, slated for 2015 as the official completion date. At this point in time, a substantial number of Singaporean houses are already equipped with the optical fiber point. These fibre terminal points residing in the houses are being rolled out progressively since 2009. The NGNBN is said to be able to deliver Gigabit speeds to every household in Singapore.

Yesterday, roughly five years before the official completion date, three Retail Service Providers (RSPs) in Singapore rolled out price plans for houses with fiber points. Singtel, Singapore largest Telecommunication & Internet provider was the first to release their NGNBN price plans. An hour later, M1 followed suit. However, at this point in time, the last Telco & ISP, Starhub, has yet to release their packages.

We are also seeing a few new players providing home/business internet services like Super Internet. This is aligned with the NGNBN agreement where the backbone cables are actually owned by the Singapore’s government and will be leased to any players in the market who wants a share in the growing Internet community.   

Here are the NGNBN price plans as of this post (*** updated @ 12.40 p.m.).

** click to enlarge.

Of all the current price plans, only Singtel has openly stated their limitation/capped international download speeds. For their cheapest plan (exPress 150), their international speed is capped at 15Mbps while all the other plans are capped at 25Mbps. The higher pricing for Singtel plans could be due to their promise of international upstream/downstream speed. Starhub and Singtel are providing guaranteed international speed (refer to price plan above). This speed promise maybe a result of caching frequent overseas pages in local datacenters.

As of now, only M1 is providing both Starhub and M1 are offering 1 Gbps speed for home based internet. And as a move to get more people into their NGNBN services, M1 had a wild marketing spree yesterday. M1 provided a three month free trial of their 100Mbps price plans. And as a typical eager Singaporean, yours sincerely waited 2 hours to get a hold of their free trial pack which includes a Huawei GH256 wireless gateway. This is such a positive marketing move by M1 who are new to providing internet services in Singapore.

However, eager early adopters are waiting with much anticipation for Starhub’s price plans which will be released several hours from now. Starhub has been known to provide very competitive pricing plans/deals that could attract many customers. Their NGNBN price plans should be available during COMEX 2010 (Suntec Convention Hall) which will start @ 11 a.m. Singapore time.

Looking at all the internet price plans available at the moment, overlaps occur in terms of price vs. bandwidths. For example, a 6Mbps ADSL2+ Singnet connection is priced at $39.90 while an M1 25Mbps is going at the same price (as of the time of this post). I could only guess the drop of internet pricings across the board for most ADSL plans and older cable price plans. Hence, for those who aren’t looking for larger bandwidths, this might come as a treat for you.

Lastly, come mid-September, I will be providing you with the insights of the performance of the NGNBN services (by M1 and probably one other RSP). So stay tuned!