The very moment when fibre optic cable laying started, I immediately opted for it. And soon enough, when the first telco M1 first launched fibre home broadband, I went ahead to sign for a 3 months trial without any consideration. Initially, it was full of issues:

Installation Address. Beat the queue and shop from the comfort of your own home. Free TV Installation. Enjoy a waiver worth up to $145 wherever applicable. Exclusive Deals. Treat yourself and be spoilt for choice with our exclusive deals just for you.
While the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) installation service is free for all customers, router installation service is only available for Fibre Home Bundle and Fibre Entertainment Bundle subscribers. For Unlimited Fibre subscribers, only ONT is provided so you can.

a) Very low speed for both Up/Down stream [10/20] even I signed for a [50/100]b) No VOIP
c) VPN cannot work even when connection is made

But I am glad at least they have resolved all these issues after more than 2 weeks of interactions with them months back. I guessed this was the whole purpose of giving me free 3 months trial? Now the speed is blazing fast close to the promised specifications.

Upgrade to OpenWeb Fibre today and get Uncapped Fibre, Free Installation and a Free Router. Zero throttling on all our packages. Speeds from 4Mbps to 200Mbps. Any Vodacom signup will be charged R1497.00 for installation. Please note there are a limited number of new R5,000 Pure Fibre Specials available. However, if you do successfully sign up for a Pure Fibre package you will always be uncapped, unshaped and unthrottled as long as you have your fibre. Bundled with mobile subscription (Enjoy discounts on your mobile subscription with Singtel Circle) Contract. Enjoy a 3-month fee waiver or a $5 monthly bill rebate. Get up to six months of free Singtel TV and Fibre Broadband when you swap your current ISP to Singtel. Service Activation Fee.

After going through the whole experience, I’ve decided to document down the key steps & considerations for all reference. Feel free to add and comment against these.

Steps to enable FIbre Home Broadband:

1) Check if your block / area is fibre connection ready
2) Sign up for the fibre optic cabling from common corridor box to your home. It pays to settle with the foreign workers to lay extra length of the cable for you at nominal rate. Else you can pay for the standard rates to extend the fibre termination point to your desired room. It is advise to terminate next to a power point (at least with 2 – one for OTP modem, one for Residential Gateway/Router)

3) After the cable is laid & tested, you can proceed to sign up with the Telco – M1, Starhub, SingTel. Pricing is competitive. But all fibre plans are more cost effective than the regular ADSL or Cable broadband plans. Do indicate to them if you are using their free RG or your own routers. Else a later switch, there will be downtime & you need to wait 5 days for the switch
4) Installation will happen in several separate occasions, unlike the regular service which can be activate in 1-3 days:
a. OpenNet team will install the OTP modem [2 weeks after sign up]. There are 4 LAN ports and each one is meant for a Telco provisioning.

b. Telco will come next to hook up the Residential Gateway (RG) or your own router to the respective ports in OTP modem. The ports will be configured & opened by them. You will not be able to do in advanced by your own. [1 week+ after OpenNet]

Other Tips:

1) Do not use the free standard Residential Gateway – security is bad, does not allow DHCP reservations, speed is bad (non-optimised router packet headers)
2) You can bridge rooms via LAN home plugs, but could limit your room-room connection speed to 12Mbps.
3) Always use Gigabit routers / switches to avoid bandwidth limitations across devices
4) Tested in my home setup : Linksys WRT610N, Aztech Gigabit home plugs, TP Link gigabit switch, Apple Mac Extreme router, Synology DiskStation 1511+
5) If you need the free VOIP service, you will need to use their RG.

Have fun & good luck!

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Fibre’s coming to your home – what you need to know

As you may have heard, some 95 per cent of Singapore is being wired up with fibre optic cables for the country’s next-generation broadband network, which promises an almost unlimited speed boost over existing SingTel’s copper-line phone system and StarHub’s HFC (hybrid fibre coaxial) network.

But little has been said about what this cable laying project means to the average Joe.

Earlier this week, OpenNet, the consortium tasked with wiring up Singapore, gave the media a glimpse of how things will pan out. The quick takeaway is that it is on-schedule, and will be sending letters to residents in selected areas to inform them that contractors would be coming to their homes to hook up the new cables.

Here are some things you, the home owner and tech goondu, should be aware of.

1. It’s just the cable, stupid
First, to clarify things, what OpenNet (the “NetCo” in this broadband project) is doing is simply laying the fibre optic cable to your home, much like StarHub did with its cable TV network more than a decade ago. The difference this time: another company called the “OpCo” – Nucleus Connect – will have to “light up” the cables or basically enable the cables to do what they are supposed to do. More on this later.

Some lucky folks will get commercial services as early as the first half of next year, according to the Singapore authorities. But for now, the excitement will be confined to seeing a group of contractors come to install a new cable, which will be inactive for a while until another bunch of folks come to hook up additional gear to “light it up”.

When the OpenNet folks – look out for them in purple polo shirts – come knocking, they will bring the fibre optic cable inside your home and hook this up to a wall socket of sorts. Just think of it as another cable point next to your phone and cable TV sockets. This installation is free for most people – the exception being those who live in a big bungalow that requires more than 15 metres of fibre optic cables to wire up.

Just like StarHub’s cable TV rollout, this free offer to wire up is for one-time only. Should you reject it, you will have to pay S$220 or more when you change your mind later, after seeing your neighbour download his pirated movies 10 times faster than you.

2. Things might not be pretty
Singapore is such a beautiful city because most of its cables are hidden underground and this continues to be the case for the next-generation broadband network.

At Cantonment Drive, where the first flats are being wired up, OpenNet showed reporters how it will be using underground ducts provided by SingTel (one of its shareholders) to run cables all over Singapore – and all the way to the foot of your high-rise HDB flat – without having to dig up any ground.

From here, the fibre optic cables run up a riser and exits on every floor through the common corridor – think of the riser as a lift shaft for cables.

Up to here, the cables are still well-concealed. But this is where the difficulty begins. In some HDB blocks with ceilings that conceal existing wiring, like the Cantonment Drive flat that we were brought to, the new fibre optic cables have to be run along the corridor with rather ugly white plastic trunking. The trunking’s okay for one apartment, but when several apartments are hooked up with the trunking on each floor, it stands out.

To be honest, this is still ways neater than the bare wires you see hanging overhead in some other cities. But being the house-proud people that Singaporeans are, some residents will surely complain.

The irony is, if your estate is older (say, over 10 years old), OpenNet says you should already have some sort of ugly plastic trunking for existing cables. In this case, the new cables can just fit in there without making your corridor any uglier!

The same applies for running the cable inside your home as well. If you already have ugly plastic trunking all over your walls, then the co

Free Fibre Installation Singapore