As part of IDA's continuing efforts to develop the vibrancy of the local broadband market, we have embarked on an exercise to provide consumers with more information on broadband services in Singapore. We have released information on the drivers for higher speed broadband services, pricing information and results from a snapshot measurement exercise of broadband access speeds in Singapore. This information was released on IDA's website on 9th June 2006.

Network Diagram Of The Broadband Measurement Setup

There is a wide spectrum of broadband services being offered by various service providers in Singapore and they range from an entry-level 512 kbps to the top-of-line 30 Mbps service. While entry-level broadband services are less expensive in absolute terms, the prices, when normalised to a per 100 kbps basis, show that higher-speed broadband services offer better value for money. A recent report by the US-based Communications Media Analysis Group shows that the difference can be as much as 26 times. This trend holds true in Singapore as well where our study shows the difference in Singapore to be about 30 times.

Higher bandwidth permits you to do more with your broadband services. It means you can download a file, especially a large file, in much shorter time, support more concurrent users, run more concurrent applications and support streaming of higher quality audio and video content. One possible scenario of a family in the near future would be: the mother watching a high definition IPTV show (8 Mbps), the father conducting a 3-party video conference call (8 Mbps), the son playing a multi-party online game (6 Mbps) and the daughter streaming a high quality video from a video sharing website (2 Mbps), resulting in a total load of 24 Mbps which only higher-speed broadband services can support.

Given that there are many factors on the public Internet that can limit the connection speed between an end user and the application provider and that some of these factors are outside the control of the broadband service provider, most service providers have committed to only a "best-efforts" or an "up to" speed guarantee in their broadband service. Our study shows that service providers in Singapore have performed quite respectably overall and they do deliver at or close to their advertised speeds over the past 6 months.

Moving forward, under the iN2015 Masterplan, Singapore will build the Next Generation National Infocomm Infrastructure (Next Gen NII) which will be capable of delivering broadband speeds of up to 1Gbps. With this ultra high speed network, a host of advanced and bandwidth-intensive applications such as high-definition television (HDTV), high quality audio and video streaming and conferencing, telemedicine remote diagnosis, sensor networks, fast storage networks, etc. will become a reality.

If you would like to know more about the possibilities of broadband and get tips on how you can get more out of your broadband connection, read the full article at the IDA website.

Contributed by Ms Yee Poh Cheng
Senior Consultant, Network Technologies, IDA.