Demythifying Singapore’s Connectivity Landscape

Singapore tops global connectivity rankings as one of the most wired cities on Earth. With multiple submarine cables landing on our shores, seemingly abundant infrastructure and competitive service providers to choose from, attaining robust connectivity may appear no harder than signing a check.

However, the devil is always in the details. Years of industry consolidation coupled with rising demand have bred several common misconceptions that obscure the reality enterprises face when selecting connectivity partners and solutions today. Let’s examine 5 key myths plaguing Singapore’s business connectivity space – and the actual truth needed to make informed decisions.

Myth 1: Connectivity speeds achieved will match subscribed plans

Reality: Effective speeds are impacted by oversubscription and congestion
Carriers often sell business-grade plans promising symmetrical gigabits from attractive price points. However, bandwidth is rarely dedicated but shared on overbooked networks with lopsided utilization patterns. This leads to extreme fluctuations in effective throughput based on community traffic – weakening reliability and speed. Always verify if guaranteed dedicated capacity or shared lanes will be provided.

Myth 2: Any plan delivers adequately low latency

Reality: Latency depends vastly on routes and backbone design
Singapore’s networks span a tiny land area. Yet latency performance still swings wildly between 20ms to nearly 100ms even locally – attributed to backbone design and distance packets travel to peering partners before hair pinning back. This causes severe lags for enterprise apps and emerging technologies like cloud gaming relying on real-time interactivity. Assess PoPs used, routes and pings to critical destinations instead of assuming all services deliver adequately.

Myth 3: There is sufficient route diversity

Reality: Heavy reliance persists on single exchange resulting in common failure points
While Singapore’s small size limits route diversity, observations reveal that a majority of players converge within a single private exchange before diverging thereafter. This results in common failure domains manifesting as simultaneous outages whenever the key node develops faults. Seek providers offering genuine route segregation through Points of Presence spread citywide.

Myth 4: Last mile causes outages, not backbone networks

Reality: Tier one service providers demonstrate strong last mile impacting overall experience
Operators often point to weaknesses in building access circuits when connectivity fails. However, assessments show top players focus heavily on delivering robust last mile uptime averaging over 99.95%, outstripping their core infrastructure service levels. Seek SLAs covering entire delivery chain or focusing on last mile for optimal experience.

Myth 5: Support necessarily resolves chronic performance issues

Reality: Symptoms require troubleshooting, but chronic problems reflect network limitations
Top-notch technical support is invaluable. However, frequent cases of connections struggling to cope with applications demand more scrutiny of underlying network capabilities before further optimizations. If root cause determination points consistently to symptomatic containment instead of boosting capacity, bandwidth ceilings likely plague infrastructure no amount of tweaking can resolve persistently.

Making Informed Connectivity Decisions

Now equipped with insights deconstructing common myths, enterprises can penetrate façades to make informed decisions evaluating providers and offerings thoroughly. Assessing factors from dedicated paths to overall network design allows selection of connectivity delivering genuine reliability and consistent speeds aligned with service level needs. Partner with unconflicted players focused on customer transparency and performance accountability from end to end