Lemming's Insane Ranting

When 1-NET first came out and I was one of the priviledged few in Singapore to trail out their FTN service with the first Motorola CyberWave CME. It was wonderful to be on the broadband wagon as I described in my television interview with the media, how fast it all was having webpages load up literally instantaneously.

Things became understandably slower when they commercialised the service with Singapore Cable Vision with the technology being essentially a shared pipe (as much as the silly twits keep denying that) and then almost 8 years down the road since then, I've jumped the bandwagon over to ADSL service because service was just unbearably slow during peak periods.

STILL, ADSL wasn't a huge jump although service reliability was so much better since your line to the node, although copper, isn't shared like cable. But if I were to be a complete idiot and ignore my groundings in networks, I'd have to lament about the near 50% drop in speeds since my first experience with broadband internet.

It has to be said that Singapore was indeed on the forefront years ago when they wired up the whole island with FTN over HFC, which Australia is only starting to do so as to connect up the rural areas of the country. But what about our speeds?!

Starhub's got a 100Mbps service, Singtel should be embarassed that they've only managed to hit 10Mbps when ADSL2+ is rated for 24MBps! It's thus not surprising that we're not even listed in the chart... We might have been one of the first countries to be totally wired up not withstanding that we're an extremely small one... but where is the progress? What have we done since then? NOTHING!

We have in fact gone backwards... ISPs have started throttling bandwidth and I'm damn well sure that they're enforcing a tiered service to their subscribers! Meaning your packets get priority if you're on a pricier subscription...

Where has the Singapore edge gone?Where is the future that the supposedly pre-emptive government so beautifully painted? Was the "de-regulation" of our telco industry a good thing? Is there some sort of sick conspiracy (though wouldn't be surprising considering who owns them) between Starhub and Singtel to keep our broadband speeds low?

It's in Singapore that net neutrality makes sense...