Singapore: Island in the Stream
Singapore has one of the most advanced broadband infrastructures in the world. A broadband network covers 99 percent of the Southeast Asian republic, supporting both ADSL and cable connections at transmission speeds in excess of 500Kbps, offering the potential to deliver broadband content to almost every doorstep on the island.
How did Singapore achieve this? For starters, the country is very small. The island is roughly three-and-a-half times the size of Washington, D.C., and 85 percent of its 4 million inhabitants live on just 28 square miles. But Singapore's success as a pioneer of broadband infrastructure can be largely attributed to a decidedly hands-on approach by the government in creating the broadband network, known as Singapore ONE.
"Broadband was something we strongly felt the country should develop for the future," says Khoong Hock Yun, assistant chief executive of the government agency, Infocomm Development Authority (IDA). The IDA, along with government agencies, the National Science & Technology Board, the Economic Development Board and the Singapore Broadcasting Authority, helped launch Singapore ONE in 1998.
"We believe that broadband technology provides our population with a competitive advantage, in terms of getting information, building a knowledge-based economy and helping people to live a higher quality of life," Khoong says. "[After getting the technology in place] our goal now is to increase the number of subscribers for the broadband services."
While the rest of the world's streaming industry players are lamenting the relatively low rate of broadband proliferation -- blaming sluggish broadband rollout for the slow takeoff of their own content and services -- Singapore is wired and ready for those "killer" streaming apps. Still, despite the country's impressive telephony and data networks, even Singapore ONE's most ardent supporters admit it's too early to determine the success of the initiative. "The broadband/multimedia industry is still at its infancy stage and much of the requisite infrastructure and organizational forms are still evolving," concluded a summary of findings by the IDA in March of 2000.
"Singapore has done well with getting the infrastructure in place …but not well enough," says John Wigglesworth, vice president and director of creative services for Four Media Company Asia, an independent television production facility in Singapore that has begun providing streaming production services. Wigglesworth notes that content and service providers have been slow to leverage the new network. "The majority of the streaming content comes from the United States -- there's just not enough local content," he says. But he admits that this situation is changing slowly.
| Enough Globally, More Locally Though the development of streaming content with a local flavor has thus far lagged behind the rollout of the broadband services designed to carry it, a new crop of entertainment content providers has emerged on the scene in Singapore ...
|
Fat Pipes, Hungry Users
If there's a lack of local streaming content in Singapore, it doesn't appear to be hurting broadband service providers. To attract broadband service subscribers, the government launched an effort earlier this year, known as "e-Celebrations Singapore," which included a month-long public outreach program featuring Internet activities. As part of the celebration, the government announced a program to guarantee every Singaporean over the age of 5, a free e-mail address and personal Web site.
The government efforts appear to be paying off, as Singapore now boasts the highest number of Internet users in Asia, with 46 percent of the population over the age of 15 accessing the Internet on a monthly basis. In addition, according to a recent study by the France-based research firm NetValue, 53 percent of Singapore households are connected to the Internet, the highest national percentage in the world. (The United States came in second with 50 percent, says NetValue.) However, just 4 percent of Singaporeans are accessing the backbone through broadband connections — 3 percent with high-speed cable, and 1 percent with ADSL connections.
Singapore's two major access providers -- those who are linking households to the Singapore ONE backbone -- are Singapore Cable Vision (SCV) and Singapore Telecom (SingTel). SCV completed the construction of its island-wide hybrid-fiber coaxial broadband network in 1999. There are currently 235,000 homes subscribing to SCV MaxTV, the company's cable TV service, and 22,000 homes using SCV MaxOnline, a broadband Internet access service via cable modem. SingTel operates Magix, which was launched as a nationwide service in November 1997 as the first commercial ADSL deployment in the world.
page 1 2 next >>