iDA announced on 26 September 2008 the award of the Singapore Next Generation National Broadband Network (NBN) contract. The contract is awarded to OpenNet, which is the alliance formed by Singtel, Axia, SPH and SPT. This award promises the broadband infrstructure islandwide of “up to and beyond” 1Gbps using fibre optic, as early as 2010, and to be completed by 2012. I am not exactly sure if this project upgrade or replace Singapore ONE infrastructure which runs on ATM network, but it provides the fibre optic termination points island wide to enable fast Internet connection at up to 1Gbps.
First, we all know Singtel and SPH, but who is Axia? Who is SPT? I did a quick googling, Axia is a company that design and operate the broadband network. SPT is the acronym of SP (Singapore Power) Telecommunication Pte Ltd. OpenNet consortium beat the Infinity consortium for this contact, which was formed by Starhub, M1 and QIA. QIA, Qatar Investment Authority, is the investment company of State of Qatar (think is pretty much similar to Temasek Holding), provides the necessary financing for the Infinity consortium.
With this award and government’s funding of $750 million, the OpenNet will be incorporated by 10 Oct 2008. OpneNet will roll out the fibre optics island wide to business and residential units, including building and non-building units. What this mean to us is a fibre connection will be terminated in our house, free-of-charge during the roll out phase, if the termination point is within 15 meters from the corridor or the gatepost of the landed property. These fibre points will be leased to ISP at fix rate of $15/per month to provide the Internet Service.
Read carefully, the $15/month is what OpenNet charged to the ISP. OpenNet provides the infrastructure and the accesibility from our home and offices. Don’t be naive to think that you can get “up to” 1Gbps at only $15. You still have to pay the ISP, the like of Singtel, Starhub, Pacific Internet extra for internet access, who need to maintain their own core network switching, connection to the overseas ISP through submarine fibre cable etc. On the other hand, what this means is that it will definitely drive the Internet access cost lower eventually. Singtel and Starhub are the only two that have the necessary infrastructure and technology to provide us with the broadband access now – the ADSL throug the Telecom Exchange, and the Coaxial cable laid by Starhub to provide the cable TV and Internet service. They can continue to charge us expensive internet access if nothing is done since they owned the infrastructure. With the formation of OpenNet, the infrastructure will be leased out the ISP, and the job of ISP is to reduce the operation cost of their core switching network, AS peering and connectivity to overseas etc.
So are we going to get a very fast broadband internet by 2012? Yes and No. File download within Singapore will definitely see improvement. However, overseas connection are limited by the upstream of the ISP. If the ISP never improve itself there is nothing we can do.
Can we really get 1Gbps throughput? Chances is that a home user can never hit 1Gbps. Unlike the DSL technology which point-to-point up to the Telecom Exchange, a fibre network like this is still very much converge to a choking point. For those who in HDB and apartment, it is still pretty much like Starhub network, though each of us is given a 1Gbps link, but perhaps a 200 households units need to share a 50Gbps, or may be an area of 5,000 households area need to share a 100Gbps. This is very much dependant on the network design. Eventually we may face the same problem – younger estate with more tech-savvy people will get lower throughput.
The submarine cable is also very very expensive. Unless they also start laying some of these cables to increase the real Intenet throughput, else I do not see real benefit translated to the end-user. Just an example – at the time of writing this blog, Sunday 2.15pm, a speedtest using www.speedtest.net shows that throughput to local server can achive 11Mbps (which is very close to the 12Mbps limit for my contract), but throughput to New York is 1.5Mbps.
Off peak download speed from local server
Off peak download speed from New York server
Those were the result of off peak hour. The following shows the result during peak hour:
Peak hour speed test to local server
Peak hour speed test to New York server
And don’t forget if the ISP may still impose some QoS so as to give some mimimum throughput to individual home users. We already know that Starhub is QoS some of our traffic like video streaming from youtube.com or tudou.com, I will not be surprise they will continue to do that to maintain profitability at our expense.
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