Singapore’s wholesale fibre pricing for consumer services is almost half the dollar amount and offers faster speeds than what is likely to be provided by Chorus under the Ultra Fast Broadband initiative.
Aileen Chia, deputy director-general (Telecoms & Post) at the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) says the wholesale price that a Retail Service Provider pays is $SP 21 ($NZ 20) for a connection that provides broadband speeds of up 100Mbps.
According to the draft price list released by Chorus today, the wholesale price to RSPs is $37.50 per month for 10Mbps upstream /30Mbps downstream or $55 per month for 50Mbps/100Mbps.
Chorus has been awarded around 70 percent of the UFB build.
In a similar move to New Zealand, the Singapore government has backed a new fibre build. The Singapore fibre network is separated into three distinct layers and, as with the UFB, wholesale providers cannot offer retail services. Fibre services in Singapore were first deployed to homes in August 2009 and the goal is to achieve 95 percent coverage by June 2012 (it is currently at 70 percent).
Chia says the first installation of fibre to the customer’s home in Singapore is free (this is similar to New Zealand), but subsequent installations will cost residents $SP 220 for apartments and $SP 450 for landed properties. There are currently six service providers offering more than 30 fibre-based broadband access plans, some of which are packaged with value added services such as online storage, video chat and web hosting. Read the rest of this article on Computerworld.
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