Choosing a fibre provider in Singapore for a SME

Choosing a fibre provider in Singapore for a SME

Recently, my company decided to move offices and thus we had to find a new broadband provider. Surprisingly, and unbeknownst to many, Singapore has more broadband providers to offer than just Singnet, Starhub and M1net. The country is currently rolling out its Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network (Next Gen NBN), with service providers "starting to offer services and products that can leverage the ultra high speeds delivered over the network." A list of such Next Gen NBN providers can be found here.

My company soon narrowed down this list of providers to 5 we would choose our fibre connection from. The following is based on information I was given in response to inquiries I made to their respective sales teams and are purely based on my personal experiences. I have some experience with IT stuff, but am by no means a professional, so please take all this with a grain of salt and comment on obvious mistakes.

If you choose a fibre provider in Singapore it is good to know that while speeds within Singapore may be multiple times higher, all international lines are limited to 25 Mbps. So, even if you go for a 200 Mbps line, as soon as the information has to travel outside Singapore, the speed will reduce significantly. Therefore, and as most of our business is international and doesn't require huge amounts of data to be shuffled around, we decided to go with a dedicated 20 Mbps fibre line. Further, we have our own server and firewall, thus we required at least one static IP.   

The five companies our SME was considering as a fibre provider were: MyRepublic, OSInet, Singnet, Starhub and Viewquest. Below you can find the pricing/offering for the different SME packages they offer and my comments.

MyRebuplic apparently is a relatively new broadband provider setting out to roll up the Singaporean ISP market I feel. Their SME offer seems to be compelling at a first glance:

A 100 Mbps line for SGD 199/month with a 12 month contract. Additionally SGD 40/month for a static IP, one-time charges of SGD 1080 (One-time service sign-up, activation & equipment installation charge of $492.20 plus Installation of OpenNet Termination Point (TP) for Business premises is $548.91). Included is one router with 4 lines. However, MyRepublic currently has no formal SLA (Service Level Agreement) in place. A sales employee I spoke to talked of 96% up-time guarantee, with 1 -2 recovery days if there is a problem and daily maintenance at 3-4 am in the morning. Apparently, there is no backup. The connection would take 2-3 week to activate once the building is fibre ready. As we are a SME that is doing virtually all business online, an informal 96% up-time guarantee with 1-2 days of recovery time in case of service interruption was not an option for us.

Viewquest has a 20 MB/s dedicated fibre line offering for SMEs for SGD 350/month, 2-year contract and no one-time setup costs. They provide a router for four lines and the repair time would take a maximum of 8 hours if it's a modem issue (customer end)/ 4 hours if it's a network issue, they do have a backup line. The SLAs in place for all providers except MyRepublic are all around 95%.

Singnet's offer for 20 MB/s is priced at SGD 350/month as well, on top there is a one-time fee of SGD 800. Starhub is slightly more expensive at SGD 369/month, but has no set-up fee.

All of the above would have been viable options and the pricing differences are marginal in the longer run. However, the offer that convinced us the most came from OSInet. 
  
OSInet offered 8 IP addresses (by default, you cannot choose just 1 static IP), 24x7 network monitoring and helpdesk support (if there is a problem with the line, they are supposed to detect it first and give you a ring); and an online bandwidth utilization report. Further included is hardware on loan, on-site installation, hardware maintenance, on-site replacement of faulty equipment and up to 4 configuration change requests per month (via remote access). However, the big downside was that their initial offer was ridiculously overpriced, nearing double the price the other providers asked for. After some very hard bargaining with a very nice sales lady, we brought the price down to the level of the other major providers and then went with OSInet.

Apparently, OSInet leases their line from Singnet. Previous to the activation, if your apartment/office does not yet have a Fibre Termination Point, Singnet has to come in to do the installation and get the unit fibre ready, then OSInet will come in and do their respective part of the setup, all-in-all this process takes about 3-4 weeks.