Sep 6, 2007
Broadband race heats up with M1's new fibre optic networkTelco plans to fork out $60m to lay own cables to offer speeds of 100mbps
By Alfred Siew
THE race for 'next-generation' broadband services is hotting up. M1 is preparing a fibre optic network that will eventually enable Internet surfing at 30 times the speeds it now offers.
The network, due in two to three years, would help put M1's fastest Internet speed on a par with that of an existing service offered by StarHub.
Costing $40 million to $60million, the islandwide network will essentially be a 'backbone' hooking up M1's cellphone base stations, wireless broadband users on the go, and in future, homes too.
M1 now pays third parties such as SingTel about $20 million a year to route traffic through their networks.
M1 chief executive (CEO) Neil Montefiore said the telco has decided to sink its own cables into the ground, to cut costs in the long term and boost speeds ahead of a tough broadband market.
By connecting to faster cables in the ground, M1 will find it easier to boost wireless surfing speeds to 100 megabits per second (mbps) - 30 times the 3.6mbps it offers currently - in the coming years.
This will put it on a par with the fastest service in the market now, which is StarHub's 100mbps offering that has been taken up mostly by heavy Internet surfers.
To eventually extend the fibre optic cables to every home, M1 may still have to foot a yet undetermined amount.
But to users, these future services will offer more choice, as service providers prepare to boost speeds in the next few years.
With faster links, a movie could be downloaded in minutes, instead of the hours or even days it now takes.
The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) is pushing for faster broadband speeds in the country with a tender out for an ultra-fast broadband network that will let people watch high-definition (HD) movies and send huge data files in just minutes.
An IDA spokesman said the network, dubbed Next Generation National Broadband Network, will be rolled out on time in 2012, despite recent delays in its call to telcos for proposals.
Some operators such as M1 - which has tendered for the job - are firing up their engines before the tender results are out next year. Mr Montefiore said building work will begin as soon as the end of this year, after M1 selects the contractors for the job.
'We will build it even if we do not win the tender from the Government,' he told The Straits Times.
Rivals SingTel and StarHub are not sitting still either. SingTel plans to hook up homes with fibre optic cables, which enable almost infinite speed boosts over the ageing copper wires commonly used now.
SingTel's CEO for Singapore, Mr Allen Lew, said this is likely to take place after results are out for the Government's next-generation network, which some experts say will cost up to $1 billion.
He argued it made more sense to extend SingTel's existing fibre optic network to homes, rather than rely on the copper phone lines that carry Internet traffic to homes now.
StarHub, meanwhile, has said it is ready to boost speeds to 160mbps 'in the near future'.
Market watchers expect all three telcos to jostle for customers with ever faster services, as competition heats up.
Mr Foong King Yew, research director at Gartner, pointed to HD videos, song downloads and online gaming as things that will gobble up bandwidth at home. 'The demand may just stack up if several people go online at the same time,' he said.
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