There's more nuance to how a connection is considered good. connection speed is largely meaningless for most people, and is just a convenient number ISPs like to use to differentiate their services in the market.
the real metric that really matters is how well peered they are, and how much upstream capacity they have relative to their user base, and the quality of their upstream transit providers.
And guess what? this aspect isn't transparent, so good luck to you unless you put in effort to figure it out.
Good point.
On the other hand, each user has his or her own use case, so it is hard to say if one ISP is absolutely better than another ISP (taking about established ISPs here, not SIMBA which seems to be worse compared to any other ISP).
For example, I do not recommend new user to sign up for SingTel because of the use of ONR. But apparently there are many users who do not care about the limitations of ONR. Some may even prefer ONR as they want to save one router in the DB box.
Another case, you often like to criticize SingTel for bad international routing (thus often not good for gaming) which is quite true for some locations. But in reality it depends on the locations users care. M1 may be good for certain location yet very bad for other locations (read the China example being mentioned now).
On the backend capacity side, it seems to me SingTel may be the best. But then I will still not recommend SingTel for 5Gbps plan but rather I will recommend Starhub 5Gbps plan, because of the ONR used by SingTel. I tend to believe Starhub backend capacity issue is a temporary issue and most likely they should be able to support 5Gbps users well even during peak hours.
They may need more time to sort out capacity issues for 10Gbps users though, so I would not recommend Starhub/MR 10Gbps plan as of now.
Among the big three, M1 may be the weakest in terms of backend capacity. I suspect that is the main reason they are not launching 5Gbps/10Gbps plan now. The other concern may be due to the profitability issue. Starhub is very aggressive in terms of 5Gbps plan pricing at S$45. Even SingTel is quite aggressive with the S$49.9 new user 5Gbps pricing.
So yes there are many nuances that we would not know. The users may need to carry out more research, at least to ask in the respective thread.
But I guess most of the average users will not go wrong with the following plans.
1) M1 500Mbps plan (or Starhub 500Mbps for existing users)
2) M1 1Gbps plan (or Starhub 1Gbps for existing users)
3) M1 and Starhub 2Gbps plan at S$39 per month, but need to take note these two are dual 1Gbps plan and may need careful planning of the home network arrangement.
