StarHub broadband customers have plenty to cheer about. StarHub has just announced that all of its MaxOnline broadband customers will now be able to access any of its wireless hotspots islandwide for free. It used to cost S$10 per month. But there's more, StarHub customers can now also surf at the national Wireless@SG for free, even though StarHub is not one of the three service providers that won the IDA tender.
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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.
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Consumers were unhappy over M1’s new unlimited wireless broadband service, which has turned out to be not really unlimited after all. Launched on Tuesday, M1 Broadband has been touted as an anytime, anywhere alternative to both consumer and business broadband in Singapore. However, it turns out that the broadband service has a “fair use policy” in its terms and conditions that caps the monthly usage to 2 GB per month. Users may, at the option of M1, be charged 1 cent per additional KB for use beyond the 2GB limit. That’s a staggering $10,000 for an additional 1 GB of use.
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StarHub has won the broadcast rights to Barclay's English Premier League for the next three seasons. This recent announcement is key because of two reasons. The first is that in the past, StarHub had to buy the rights from ESPN Star Sports which used to lock down the Asia-Pacific rights and then sell to StarHub. But now, StarHub is dealing directly with Barclay's.
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It's hard to believe but SingTel's phone network went down for at least 7 hours yesterday. Apparently, only those who are on the 3G network were affected. Those on 2G phones were not. According to SingTel, the system was down from late morning to 5pm yesterday. The official response from SIngTel was: "We apologise for any convenience caused by the intermittent interruption in our 3G service yesterday. We had advised some of our 3G customers who were experiencing difficulties in making and receiving mobile calls to manually select and switch to our 2G/2.5G network on their mobile phones. Our 3G service was back to normal at around 5pm yesterday.
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