Here's my personal view about this M1 thing. M1 is facing stiff competition against SingTel and StarHub, with a substantial reason being that M1 is a single-play operator. Because the mobile market in Singapore is already so saturated, there is actually very little room to grow subscribers. That can affect the share price of M1 because share investors always look out for revenue growth as an indication of a good share. To continue to grow revenues in such a mature market, the only way is to grow Average Revenue Per User or what the industry calls ARPU.

Many telco operators have been hoping that data and mobile Internet can help lift their ARPU, and therefore continue with revenue growth. Unfortunately, this has not been happening.


M1 really needs another avenue for revenue growth, both for business reasons and share prices. With HSPDA, M1 now can become an ISP without incurring huge capital expenditure in buying lines or laying its own cables. However, the many problems that have emerged in this launch show that M1 still has a lot to learn about operating as a broadband ISP.

The 2GB cap may well be practiced by telcos. This I do not know, but in the mobile world few people would exceed 2GB per month. In the fixed broadband world, however, 2GB is very little. The WOW patch this week was already 480MB, a quarter of the 2GB limit. If M1 had simply marketed its HSPDA as 3.5G for mobile Internet, there would be, I suspect, few complaints from anyone. However, M1 has decided to "enter" the new market of fixed broadband and has specifically said it wants to gain market share in broadband. It even said it is targetting both business and consumer users.

Unfortunately, this has been a total disaster for the operator. No ISP talks about offering unlimited braodband and then puts a cap on the usage. And, no, nobody wants to have a Sword of Damocles hanging over its head where it may end up paying ridiculous amounts of money.

Throughput is also not good. At the press conference, M1's CTO said that users can expect throughput of about a third of the maximum speed. So if you are on 1.8Mbps, you should get 600kbps. I did not experience these speeds in my home although my colleague, who went down to city to try, said he got something like 1.2Mbps (for the 3.6 line). There are also weird things which I have not yet verified, like M1 not supporting VoIP (of which there is a clause in itsr terms).

M1's justification for imposing the fair usage policy is that it is to benefit the community of users. This sounds to me like the infrastucture for HSPDA is not good enough to be on par with fixed broadband infrastructure. For years, SingTel and StarHub have been competing on their dedicated red pipe and fat green pipe arguments, and along now comes a new player who is kinda saying its orange pipe isn't that fat, so users need to use it "fairly" so everyone can benefit as a whole.

As long as M1 had stuck to its mobile 3.5G service, it would not have been a problem for most people. But the day it started entering the ISP foray, I'm afraid it landed itself in a big marketing disaster that it now desperately needs to extricate itself out from. Meanwhile, I am getting complaints about speed. This morning a gentleman called Petet who responded to my call for callers told me he gave up his JetPack service because he wanted to go unlimited, and the S$38 seemed pretty attractive. Not anymore, since he is getting only 100kbps on his M1 broadband Line compared with the 500kbps he used to get on his JetPack. "It's like the dial-up days when you see the GIF pictures taking their time to load!"