⚡️💻 [Official] README First! 2025 SG ISP Comparison & Latest Promo Deals! ✨

[bert64]

Probably not fair to consider Disney+ as Starhub owns the rights. They're just giving for free access to a service they control, so it doesn't cost them anything to provision. They may not earn from users, but they are definitely not "out of pocket" so to speak. It's their competitive advantage since they own the rights.

Fair point on the bundled routers, but I seriously doubt the ISPs get it anywhere near retail pricing.

They don't own it, they will be paying license fees to Disney for every user.

ISPs will get a wholesale discount when they bulk buy branded routers from reputable vendors but no more than a large retailer would. The only difference is that the ISP can offer the router at a loss because they intend to make up for it on the service costs, whereas a retailer has to make a profit on selling the unit. Cellphones are often sold the same way.

The ISP-branded ones are dirt cheap (when i worked for an ISP we were paying US$3 per unit and charging customers 50+).

 

[firesong]

They don't own it, they will be paying license fees to Disney for every user.

ISPs will get a wholesale discount when they bulk buy branded routers from reputable vendors but no more than a large retailer would. The only difference is that the ISP can offer the router at a loss because they intend to make up for it on the service costs, whereas a retailer has to make a profit on selling the unit. Cellphones are often sold the same way.

The ISP-branded ones are dirt cheap (when i worked for an ISP we were paying US$3 per unit and charging customers 50+).

That's true. As the sole distrbutor, the fees they pay are much lower compared to what the users pay, so it's still nowhere near the region of $10/user. I did concede it was used more as a competitive advantage move on their part, using a Business Systems analysis perspective. I think Disney also gives them some leeway in order to build market share - because it cannot be that they're practically giving away the service too easily, if you check their recent pricing strategies, even SIM-Only plans get 12-month access included. Yet during their latest investors call, they were quite confident about their profit positions at $30 per user as of 2021 (still in the midst of the global pandemic, yet with an increasing YoY ARPU) - meaning their cost cannot be very high if they are still increasingly profitable despite adding extra things like a 12 month Disney+ subscription.
https://ir.starhub.com/newsroom/20220211_171706_CC3_7YANHDI2S0K9IULZ.3.pdf
Your sharing on their branded routers brings up a related thought. What if the routers have ISP-proprietary software? I recall Starhub's Linksys and Dlink routers in the past have had special Starhub firmware. Not really a question to answer tho, but it does raise the possibility of it being a business collaboration move rather than the ISP merely buying hardware from a brand-name supplier - which suggests the cost per unit would be even lower than a mere retail agreement if there's a business relationship there.

And the last point is something we all know - the bundled Askey and Arcadyan routers aren't as fantastic as the marketing hype makes them out to be. As many here know, even deploying multiple units of the Nokia Beacon 1 isn't all that it's made out to be. When the ISP hides the brand of the router and slaps their own brand on it, I generally avoid this if I can help it - even from the past while I preferred using off-the-shelf consumer routers instead.

 

[bert64]

I believe it comes down to profits. The price differential between 500Mbps and 1Gbps is $10/mo, or $240 over a 2 year contract that the ISPs can earn for overselling. Recently, it seems that it's going the way of $15 now, not $10, so that's $360 over a 2 year period.

To sell the faster service, they play on impatience and inadequacy - "faster is better". That's why using numbers to compare is so attractive, as intuitive humans know that the bigger number is usually the better number and it's a seemingly objective comparison. But they hide many things that users will never see (hence the reason behind my initiative for an International Speed Tests thread). But everyone plays the game - router manufacturers are also guilty of promising fantastic numbers but will never tell users the truth about what they can actually get, which is nearly Gigabit speeds in almost-perfect conditions with 802.11ax. It'll never go beyond that until they improve their LAN connection to be 2.5GbE or 10GbE, so the LAN connection becomes the bottleneck even if the wireless connection is theoretically capable of about 1.1-1.2Gbps in real world use.

Of course, there are other overheads they need to consider, operating costs, staff overheads, etc... But the kicker for many people are the share dividends they have to pay out to investors and the bonuses they pay their top executives that can come to millions of dollars. They could cut back on those and keep costs manageable for people, but it makes their offerings less interesting and may not attract investment, so it's a bit of a catch-22 here. Here there's a lot of external factors interplaying, so it's a bit complicated. But to go straight to the root, it's about profits.

Absolutely...
An average user is not going to saturate a 500mbps connection 24/7, many will not saturate it at all. I'm a fairly heavy user, and my traffic averages out to 7mbps. Sure there are brief bursts when i download something at high speed, followed by long periods when the connection is totally idle.

There are MANY cases (this forum is littered with them) where users are unable to achieve anywhere close to 1gbps for many factors - wifi limitations, upstream bottlenecks etc. If your download rate from a given destination is 100mbps, then having your link being any faster than 100mbps will make no difference unless you have other activity going on at the same time.

To answer the direct question, if you get 200mbps from KL on a 500mbps plan, you will get 200mbps from KL on a 1gbps or even 10gbps plan from the same provider using the same equipment because the line itself is not the bottleneck.

When users experience problems, they usually don't know what the root cause of the problem is and the ISP will take advantage to sell them something they don't need and which in many cases won't solve their problem. This used to happen a lot with car mechanics too...

To add: in larger markets like the UK or US, you will sometimes get some prosumer providers who cater to more tech savvy customers. In a smaller market it would be harder to sustain such an operation. In the UK for instance, the ISP provided me an IPv6 tunnel in 2001 and native connectivity in 2007, i also got a routable IPv4 block, control over reverse dns, control over upstream firewall rules etc, as well as people i could call who assumed that I would have done any necessary troubleshooting at my end, and would give me an honest answer if there were any problems. They also took customer requests into consideration when choosing or configuring upstream transit providers and peering, and they made traffic stats for their core network (eg traffic graphs/mrtg etc) available to customers.

 

[firesong]

To add: in larger markets like the UK or US, you will sometimes get some prosumer providers who cater to more tech savvy customers. In a smaller market it would be harder to sustain such an operation. In the UK for instance, the ISP provided me an IPv6 tunnel in 2001 and native connectivity in 2007, i also got a routable IPv4 block, control over reverse dns, control over upstream firewall rules etc, as well as people i could call who assumed that I would have done any necessary troubleshooting at my end, and would give me an honest answer if there were any problems. They also took customer requests into consideration when choosing or configuring upstream transit providers and peering, and they made traffic stats for their core network (eg traffic graphs/mrtg etc) available to customers.

I think that, as much as we want these things, transparency is not a given here in Singapore. A multitude of factors, but I would even point to a historical paternalistic social mindset contributing to a large part of it. Simplstically, a "you don't need to know" catchall hides many sins.

It's probably quite telling for you if we said that our most "user-experienced focused" ISPs - at least when they first came into the market - were ViewQuest and MyRepublic, and perhaps Superinternet which doesn't seem to offer any more consumer plans. In fact, even on corporate networks with QoS and network trained professionals phoning in to the ISP to seek some form of resolution, the front-line staff may not be on the same level and more often than not are not likely to give any honest answers. It's frustrating to receive obfuscations and blame pushing, even if you raise concerns over basic things like routing changes that suddenly impact business systems that were working fine. I mean, if the route is down, just say that and offer to reroute, rather than throw up a myriad of reasons but concede issues. That's IF (and a big IF) you even got a sufficiently knowledgeable person on the phone, to begin with.

When a non-network professional in management can perceive that he's having the wool pulled over his eyes by the "expert" persons on the ISP end of the phone call, something is really wrong with the system here. I'm sure many would love to have good tech guys to deal with when working with something basic like their internet connection - after all, there's surprisingly reduced friction if both are professionals on top of their game.


Even for myself, I'll concede that a lot of the bad feeling over Singtel's tech expertise and professionalism came right from day 1, when the installation person first tried to bluff his way out of the ONR Bridging request (which even my non-techy dad could call him out for). to the bumpy journey after that. If on day 1 you have some six-seven red flags over many things that happen, even to laying cables, and over time they continue to rear their ugly head, then it makes for very little trust in a relationship that's destined to fail. While I admit there are no perfect ISPs around, I'm sure anyone would appreciate not being treated like a fool and blatantly being given the runaround on so many things. I mean, the guy proudly declared the Singtel Mesh router was better than set of three Ruckus APs on a managed PoE switch (which he couldn't recognise), even companies use his Singtel Mesh router, so I shouldn't need to bridge. Or when he asked what my router was, and when I pointed the EdgeRouter to him, said that it was probably a very cheap budget router with low performance cos it was so small and had only 3 ethernet ports. I just bit my tongue and let it be. A total of 3 technicians came that same day to try and settle the bridging process which was only resolved a few days later with another visit, so it was quite the rocky start.

Yes it could simply have been two or three persons who were not very knowledgeable, but when they're customer facing and saying and doing the things they were doing right in the homes of the customers, it sends quite a message - least of all the disconcerting thought that they didn't just hire only one of them. In a way, I'm glad that people who never had to deal with the ONR issues and had to deal with the much better trained earlier staff would have good memories, and deservedly so. Some of the older networking guys were brilliant. I still fondly remember the guy who did my Magix service, all the way back in the late 1990s! He was a good reason why I was impressed enough with his knowledge and skills to pay attention in networking class while I was doing Computer Engineering back then.

 

[lobukong]

To answer the direct question, if you get 200mbps from KL on a 500mbps plan, you will get 200mbps from KL on a 1gbps or even 10gbps plan from the same provider using the same equipment because the line itself is not the bottleneck.

Thanks for the answer. I think my question wasn't very clear. I wanted to ask that, if the ISP need to throttle a connection, will 1G user get twice bandwidth than 500M user?
For example, if youtube only has US datacenters, and ISP has a connection to US. Then at peak hours everyone on 500M plan is only able to watch 1080p videos, then will 1G user be able to watch in 2K res?

 

[firesong]

Thanks for the answer. I think my question wasn't very clear. I wanted to ask that, if the ISP need to throttle a connection, will 1G user get twice bandwidth than 500M user?
For example, if youtube only has US datacenters, and ISP has a connection to US. Then at peak hours everyone on 500M plan is only able to watch 1080p videos, then will 1G user be able to watch in 2K res?

Err, 4k streaming only needs 25Mbps. Yes, twenty-five megabits per second.

So in theory, if you saturate the pipe, you should be able to theoretically stream 20 4k videos simultanously with a 500Mbps plan assuming nothing else is using the bandwidth.

The purpose of the CDN is to ensure both load distribution and geographic availability. So I guess that may partially answer your question too. But even so, if you stretch your example a bit, the restricted bandwidth could also be an issue of the datacentre having limited upload bandwidth. No one has unlimited up/down bandwidth, and bandwidth has costs. Even worse, it could be a case of your local ISP's international download link being limited (so not the fault of the US datacentre). Too many variables since you are not directly connected to the server without any intermediaries. There are multiple points in between that could have reached saturation point or caused some form of network slowdown.

 

[lobukong]

Even worse, it could be a case of your local ISP's international download link being limited (so not the fault of the US datacentre).

Yes, I'd like to consider an edge case to find out if 1G plan makes at least some sense.
Consider if local ISP international download link is limited, say 30M, then 2 users, 1 on 500M, 1 on 1G plan. Will they get 15/15 or 10/20?

 

[xiaofan]

Yes, I'd like to consider an edge case to find out if 1G plan makes at least some sense.
Consider if local ISP international download link is limited, say 30M, then 2 users, 1 on 500M, 1 on 1G plan. Will they get 15/15 or 10/20?

This one we will not know, need the insiders, maybe more like 15/15 or 14/16. But yes telcos offer gamer plans which may have better route, and it is said that 2Gbps plan or 1+1 dual 1Gbps plan users may get priorities for better international route compared to 1Gbps/500/Mbps plans. You may not notice this though for daily usage.

1Gbps does make a bit of sense compared to 500Mbps if you do a lot of video editing and then upload to various streaming sites like YouTube. Or if you really download a lot and can saturate your 1Gbps down link.

BTW, I believe Whizcomms 1Gbps users will have lower proprioty than SingTel 500Mbps users when there is a problem with SingTel international route.

For me upgrading to SingTel 1Gbps plan from 500Mbps in Sept 2018 is a good move. It does not make any real difference for my usages. But it does make me realize that I need to improve the home wireless network performance and I started to really learn how to improve the home network (and wasting quite a bit of money on various things and learned through various failures). I felt okay to get 300Mbps with a 500Mbps plan but not okay with an 1Gbps plan.

 

[firesong]

Yes, I'd like to consider an edge case to find out if 1G plan makes at least some sense.
Consider if local ISP international download link is limited, say 30M, then 2 users, 1 on 500M, 1 on 1G plan. Will they get 15/15 or 10/20?

I think it depends on the individual household's usage patterns.

If you have typical household of 4 or more persons who are actively on the internet, and at least one does a lot of downloading (for whtever reasons), and if you have family members who are quite impatient and a few seconds matters to them, then yes it's still fairly acceptable to go with 1Gbps plans. It was more youthful impatience that got me onboard the 1Gbps bandwagon all those years back - and before I understood the international bottlenecks and all the other factors. It was also because the CDN networks weren't as mature before, and higher bandwidth plans actually did equate to higher international bandwidth.

Today. it's a different story. We posit that 500Mbps is good enough for most day to day use cases, it assumes a pretty average family with no major downloading of large files constantly going on. To blatantly concede a fairly common use for faster plans that was not legal, in the past many liked to download shows (anime, movies, tv series) to watch. But with so many more legal options - streaming of shows through paid subscriptions and all the other available services, even the "shady downloading" that happened in the past (seemingly because of the unavailability of shows), people actually don't saturate their connections so much these days too. Even so, those are occasional and not 24/7 kind of usage either - the bandwidth was limited only when large file transfers happen. Perhaps you can say it's efficiency, since the 500Mbps could be sufficient for day to day, and large downloads may take a few more seconds to finish.

Now it is possible you could still legitimately enjoy having more bandwidth today. You could be doing video editing and regularly exchanging large videos files with colleagues and clients. You could be running some private family file transfer service between your relatives. No one really knows nor cares. But you know your usage patterns best.

Then there's the related issue of recurring monthly cost. Some just want to reduce their monthly overheads because $10-15 a month saved can mean something to their families, while others may not mind spending the bit extra for convenience (even considering taking the effort to do a plan downgrade an inconvenience). If you're okay to pay more and are comfortable, then why not just let it be? At the end of the day, it's also about what you're willing to pay for. If one wants to minimise unnecessary household expense so that there's more money for other things, they have options. A real practical example - the $10-15 saved on internet bills could offset the electricity price increases today, resulting in no major changes in monthly household expenses.

 

[lobukong]

Thank you.
So Whizcomms users got complain from time to time, but M1&starhub 500M users never complain? Then probably within ISP every user is relatively equal.
I do want to spend more on network if I can get some noticeable difference, or I'll just go with the 500M and never think about it again.
I even considered the myRepublic gamer plan (10/month more than normal 1G plan) before, then I notice they offer the switch up credit, up to 240 dollars for 2 years plan. (as, 240 = 10 * 24)
So I'm happy that next time I sign up I can save some money, and at the same time sad to find out the "premium" plans are basically a lie.

 

[xiaofan]

Thank you.
So Whizcomms users got complain from time to time, but M1&starhub 500M users never complain? Then probably within ISP every user is relatively equal.
I do want to spend more on network if I can get some noticeable difference, or I'll just go with the 500M and never think about it again.
I even considered the myRepublic gamer plan (10/month more than normal 1G plan) before, then I notice they offer the switch up credit, up to 240 dollars for 2 years plan. (as, 240 = 10 * 24)
So I'm happy that next time I sign up I can save some money, and at the same time sad to find out the "premium" plans are basically a lie.

If you watch this forum more often, majority of the complaints are related to wireless performance, nothing to do with ISPs.

Then when it comes to ISPs, majority of the complaints come from Viewquest (down again and again). Then there are complaints about bad internation routing to different locations (eg: gaming or China websites). Singtel/Whizcomms are usally said to be of worse international routing. But all ISPs may have the issues here. MyRepublic/Viewquest are supposed to be better than others but their China router seems to be bad compared to Singtel.

Then there are complaints about lack of deals/promotions, Singtel ONR related complaints, CGNAT from MyRepublic/Viewquest users, not so good free routers, etc.

There are really not many complaints from M1/Starhub 500 Mbps plan users (other than lack of promotion, no free routers, etc). There are also not many complaints from Whizcomms plans users (other than throttling and some special feature like VoWifi). I mentioned the routing of Whizcomms being worse than Singtel because there was one time that happened -- Whizcomms were down or with very bad latency but Singtel users were still okay, because Singtel put the Whizcomms to use the worse router first.

 

[xiaofan]

Legacy M1 2Gbps/5Gbps/10Gbps info.
https://en.ocworkbench.com/m1-intro...end-consumers-at-69-129-and-189-respectively/
Looks like they offered XG-PON ONT with one 10G port and one 1G port.

Old 10Gbps related threads:
https://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/threads/battle-of-the-10gbps-st-si-m1-vq.5331878/

 

[hereiam7788]

Legacy M1 2Gbps/5Gbps/10Gbps info.
https://en.ocworkbench.com/m1-intro...end-consumers-at-69-129-and-189-respectively/
Looks like they offered XG-PON ONT with one 10G port and one 1G port.

Old 10Gbps related threads:
https://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/threads/battle-of-the-10gbps-st-si-m1-vq.5331878/

totally overkilled... haha. even 500Mbps to any end consumers are already overkilled.

 

[xiaofan]

totally overkilled... haha.
...
even 500Mbps to any end consumers are already overkilled.

Same for 5G mobile plan now, because of lack of killer application.

That being said, AR/VR/metaverse may come which will push for high bandwidth low latency networks. So it is good that SG government is committed to push for 10 times faster broadband.

Mobile 5G/6G and Wifi 7 and affordable 10G broadband may really become popular in 5-10 years time.

I hope I do not need to use wired network at that time, wireless (Wifi 7 and 6G) will be fast enough.

 

[hereiam7788]

Same for 5G mobile plan now, because of lack of killer application.

That being said, AR/VR/metaverse may come which will push for high bandwidth low latency networks. So it is good that SG government is committed to push for 10 times faster broadband.

Mobile 5G/6G and Wifi 7 and affordable 10G broadband may really become popular in 5-10 years time.

I hope I do not need to use wired network at that time, wireless (Wifi 7 and 6G) will be fast enough.

yes, correct. 5G the only benefit to end user is the latency only, but this is only useful for those who play mobile game on the go, but given the poor coverage of 5G still, it is still not going to be useful. other than that, dun think anyone can utilise the faster speed of 5G on their mobile devices.

 

[bert64]

yes, correct. 5G the only benefit to end user is the latency only, but this is only useful for those who play mobile game on the go, but given the poor coverage of 5G still, it is still not going to be useful. other than that, dun think anyone can utilise the faster speed of 5G on their mobile devices.

The main benefit to 5G is better handling of congestion (ie fit more active users into the same physical area and radio spectrum allocation), this is very important for a densely populated location like Singapore, but the full benefits are not realised until everyone has moved over to 5G capable devices.

Lower frequency 5G bands also have longer usable range, that's not so important here but it matters a lot in larger countries.

 

[firesong]

I think there's a place for low frequency bands in Singapore, because of our high urban density. The longer range = higher penetrative power.

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with having to provision a broadband plan for each device at home that wants internet connectivity - every PC, laptop, TV, printer, etc... Moreover, telcos have been steadily doing away with multi-SIM plans, so it could mean a plan for each device - which adds up to far more than having an unlimited data broadband service.. I believe there will still be home internet connectivity for a long while more. This utopia might perhaps be realisable after 2050 when it's more ubiquitous and technological shifts are significant enough - in terms of power usage and connecivity technologies.

My PC laptop is LTE enabled, but I seldom find a need to surf over cellular data. Not least because the power drain is noteworthy enough compared to disabling the cellular modem. We can easily test this ourselves - just disable cellular on our phones and use only wifi, and we will find our phones could last a few days with light use, as opposed to having to charge it daily still.

In fact, it might be more resource efficient to have home internet connectivity and a picocell to provision supplementary mobile access over the cabled home line. Cellular connectivity within homes would remain of the lower-speed variant unless connected to indoor picocells, so performance internet (high speed mobile data) remains an outdoor thing.

Then there's the very real fear of all these high powered wireless signals affecting the human body and human development. We know birds avoid transmissions of radio waves, so it's not exactly healthy for humans to be constantly subjected to these waves.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...me-migratory-birds-inner-compasses-180951378/

There's also the other important reason why China holds a lot of 5G patents and is pushing 5G tech - it's got to do with their surveillance state policies. Phones are on-person devices, so it's easy to triangulate and track user location and movement. From a privacy pov, the west will have a lot to say about these potential violations. The frequency band overlaps between 6Ghz wifi and 5G mobile are probably not accidental, forcing a one-or-the-other choice or a compromise that limits either one from full potential.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/china-surveillance/552203/

 

[lobukong]

It's funny how Merkel's phone was spied by US and PRISM was(is?) also by US, yet China was criticized for holding 5G patents.

So US also hold lots of 5G patents, but that must be for human's better future.
The patents that China holds are for surveillance state policies.

 

[keenklee]

Thanks for the answer. I think my question wasn't very clear. I wanted to ask that, if the ISP need to throttle a connection, will 1G user get twice bandwidth than 500M user?
For example, if youtube only has US datacenters, and ISP has a connection to US. Then at peak hours everyone on 500M plan is only able to watch 1080p videos, then will 1G user be able to watch in 2K res?

IMHO.
The answer likely is no.
Request packets is far less than Receive packets.
You can send request packets but you will end up receiving packets slowly because the download is shared.

E.g. like TPG, the upload and download is capped i.e. effectively permanent throttle.
If there are a lot of users, one can send request but the receive will be slow especially if the demand is for video content.

 

[firesong]

It's funny how Merkel's phone was spied by US and PRISM was(is?) also by US, yet China was criticized for holding 5G patents.

Err, surveillance state policies and hacking a phone to access data are different things. Surveillance state, you can analogusly take to mean there's CCTV monitoring of every person within its borders - tracking movement. They've already deployed pretty advanced facial recognition software all throughout China.
https://fortune.com/2020/11/03/china-surveillance-system-backlash-worlds-largest/
It's not a criticism - it's an observation because it's what they do. It even came to light during the Winter Olympics - plenty of information online.