C/Net says Singapore will have nationwide WiFi by the end of the year. As part of its Intelligent Nation 2015 program, the island nation will be able to boast of countrywide Wi-Fi coverage in a few months, Bill Chang, executive vice president of wireless service provider SingTel, said in a recent interview.
Singapore had one public hot spot for every square kilometer at the end of last year. Communication between hot spots is augmented by mesh networking. Commercial WiMax will begin in Singapore by the end of the year, according to the report.
The country doesn’t have the large domestic market, manufacturing base or low costs of places like India and China, so the idea is to focus more on industries with a large intellectual property component, similar to what South Korea and Israel are doing. The program is backed by various government subsidies and incentives.
Other initiatives in the program include digitizing public health records, bringing broadband connections into at least 90 percent of residences, recruiting multinationals to locate their call centers for Asia in the country and in general boosting Singaporean technology exports. The country hopes to add 80,000 information technology jobs through the effort. Another goal is to put computers into 100 percent of homes with school-age children.
This is all good news for SingTel, which plans to expand, cutting deals with regional wireless carriers such as Indonesia’s Telkomsel and India’s Bharti Airtel. Through these alliances SingTel garners about 2.5 million new cellular customers a month with around 800,000 coming from neighboring Indonesia.
VSNL Singapore, the international arm of Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, announced this week an upgrade of its high capacity Trans-Pacific submarine cable network to a 1 terabit capacity. The Trans-Pacific Network (TGN-P) connects several key US West Coast Internet and carrier exchanges directly to Japan and onward to other important Asian destinations through multiple regional sub-sea cable interconnections.
Acquired by VSNL in 2005, as part of the Tyco Global Network (TGN), the transpacific fiber network, TGN-Pacific, is designed as a ring with two 12,000km submarine cables. Each cable carries eight fiber pairs with each fiber capable of carrying up to ninety-six 10 Gbit wavelengths, delivering a total network capacity of 7+ Tbit/s. KT Corporation selected Tyco’s Trans-Pacific Network to provide seamless connectivity between Korea and the West Coast of the United States.
Om Malik brings us up to speed on global telecommunications consolidation:
- Global
DoubleCrossing says it will buy FiberNet, a metro area network provider for about $96.1 million. - New Level 3 = Level 3 + Looking Glass + WilTel Communications + Progress Telecom. Level 3 Communications is trying to transform itself from a pure vanilla backbone provider to a more metro services company.
- New Qwest = Qwest + OnFiber
- Verizon = Verizon + MCI
- New AT&T = SBC + BellSouth (pending) + AT&T
- Tata Telecom = VSNL + Teleglobe + Tyco
- Reliance Communications = Reliance + FLAG Telecom
BTW, if Singapore is an Intelligent Nation, what does that make the United States?
[...] EE Times reports that Verizon Business has signed an agreement with a group of Asian telecommunications firms to build an advanced Trans-Pacific cable. It will initially provide capacity of up to 1.28 terabits per second (Tbps), but will have design capacity of up to 5.12 Tbps. [...]
Left by dailywireless.org » New China Transpacific Cable on December 18th, 2006