YiBi's Life|Live Log

I have been on M1′s fibre broadband for a month already. The plan that I have is 50Mbps down and 25Mbps up. This is the speediest result that I got. I’m doing this from my Macbook Pro over wireless network and my router is a TP-Link TLWR-1043ND Wireless-N Router running OpenWrt. Pretty decent speed I got here.

I’m not sure why there are people complaining about M1′s fibre broadband, but so far it’s pretty good for me. (Touch wood). Downloads from Filesonic and Mediafire can hit approximately 25Mbps. I’m not sure if M1′s throttling or the file sharing sites are limiting downloading speed. But either way, I’m not complaining. I’m already a very happy man with 25Mbps.

One of the things I start to enjoy very much after jumping from ADSL, is the streaming performance. I have an iPad which my wife and I watch movies and stuff. The networks that I use is PPS and LeTV. The streaming is great for these 2 networks. China bandwidth is notoriously bad. Watching anything over my previous SingNet ADSL was a huge pain. It’s obvious that the bandwidth to China is severely limited. So far, the experience on M1 is very good. My theory is that their China bandwidth has not been exhausted yet. When their subscriber base eventually picks up, they could be as bad as the other players in term of China bandwidth.

My home surveillance is now perfect, thanks to the big uplink. I’m streaming my image out from my IP Cam at 15fps, which takes up about 3Mbps of bandwidth. Neither ADSL or Cable could offer that kind of uplink speed.

M1′s having a promotion for 100Mbps at $39 bucks this coming Comex. I think it’s a no brainer. The other 2 players, namely SingTel and Starhub’s pricing are very high. The only value add is bundling with their mobile and TV services. So if you do not need cable for example (Hint: PPS/LeTV. I have a jailbroken Apple TV too!), the bundling doesn’t work anymore, so M1 becomes the most value for money plan. :)

Oh by the way, I don’t work for M1. In fact I work for the other camp, so this is neutral techie point of view. :)

Okay, I have finally signed up for M1′s fibre broadband. The activation is in a month’s time, and when it’s installed, I can say bye-bye to my SingTel landline and ADSL. The subscription for my 6Mbps ADSL is about 30 bucks, which is what I will be paying to M1 for 50Mbps. It’s a no-brainer. The offering from the other telcos are nowhere close in value. The cheapest plan from SingTel and StarHub are about 60 bucks. Can’t beat the value.

The main attraction for me to sign up for fibre broadband, is the upstream  bandwidth. I’m running IP surveillance cameras at home, which requires about 1Mbps of upstream bandwidth if I want to stream the video out at 15 frames per second. Right now over ADSL, I’m doing 5fps, and it’s completely choke my upstream bandwidth.

And with the extra bandwidth, there will be more options too. One of the things I’m definitely going to do is to get a huge harddisk and start backing up the stuff that I have deposited online over the years, ie mails from Gmail, pictures at Picasa.

Shall be updating more details when the line arrives.

Has anyone checked the coverage check at OpenNet’s website lately? A friend of mine checked his postal code and was presented with the sign up page, presumably for the installation of the fibre into his home.

This means that his estate is probably one of the first to get access to the Next Generation Broadband Network when commercial operations starts next year in Q1. I’m looking forward to see more services leveraging on this potentially high speed network.

One of the items on my personal wish list is to see storage players providing high speed secured backup and data access. Coupled with the availability of wireless network (3G, Wireless@SG), I will be able to access a single copy of my data over my many devices, instead of having to transfer to them to each machine physically, or accessing them off a remote server. High speed helps, especially when I do WebDAV for editing some of my documents stored on the servers.

But while I’m excited with all the prospects, my estate at Tampines is only getting the fibre in 2011. Anti climax.

Recent news on the Next Gen NBN can be found from the following

Rollout of Next Gen NBN Begins

Next Gen NBN Transforming the Way We Work, Live, Learn and Play