RCR Wireless News is hitting the road next week for Singapore As with every stop on our global tour, conference series and news desk, our team will engage the mobile community at the local level to better understand the impacts of mobile broadband on the economy, innovation and society as a whole.
The Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, is one of the world’s premiere telecommunications markets despite its tiny 274 mile area and population of just five million people, of which roughly 36% are foreigners.
The country – once a British protectorate – is governed by The People’s Action Party (PAP) which has won every election since Singapore began self-governing in 1959. This has led some to call it an authoritarian state, though others argue it is simply a strong, experienced and highly-qualified system, backed by a dedicated and skilled Civil Service and an education system which places a strong emphasis on achievement and meritocracy.
Certainly financially, the country is well off, with GDP in 2010 totaling $291.9 billion, of which per capita GDP was $62,100, the fifth highest in the world.
Kitted out with the most cutting edge infrastructure, the island has fostered its reputation as a tech and telecommunications hub carefully and, with the help of a supportive government and extremely progressive telecommunications regulatory regime, it is also regarded as highly competitive.
Indeed, so competitive is the telecoms space that Singaporean operators have gone beyond their own borders to play in international markets.
One such player, Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), owns Australia’s second largest mobile operator, Optus, and also has subsidiaries in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The carrier has also teamed up with Bharti Airtel in India which enables it to expand its influence over Sri Lanka and Africa, taking its total mobile subscriber base to an impressive 400 million in 2011.
At home in Singapore, too, SingTel plays a major role, however it competes with StarHub and M1, with more operators said to be entering the market after the government issued five facilities-based and 29 service-based licenses. And with no restrictions on direct or indirect foreign ownership within the country’s telecom sector, the Singaporean market has become even more competitively attractive.
Singapore’s mobile subscriber base is hyper developed, with 145% penetration reported in January 2011 and 4.7 million 3G subscribers of a total mobile market of 7.3 million. That’s an astounding 66% of Singapore’s total mobile subscriber base, driven by high availability and affordable smartphones.
Similarly, 103% of households in Singapore sport a fixed-line telephone connection, while over 20% of homes have two fixed-line services. There were 8.8 million broadband Internet subscribers at last count in Singapore, with an annual growth rate this year of 13%.
Instead of the government laying back on its laurels, however, Singapore is attempting to boost its national broadband even further through its 10-year Infocomm Master Plan initiated back in 2006.
The plan, dubbed Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) and which involves the building out of an optical fiber network, is part of what is being called the Next Generation National Infocomm Infrastructure and has seen government investments to the tune of US$725 million thus far.
To ensure fairness and competitiveness, the government has mandated that the network should be an ‘open system’ with access available to all operators. Meanwhile, the OpenNet consortium is designing and building the infrastructure, while StarHub’s Nucleus Connect has won the operating company contract thus far, meaning it now has the right to build and operate the wholesale broadband network across Singapore.
The Infocomm Development Authority has said it hopes to have rolled out the network universally in the island by 2013.
