It now appears subscribers to Singapore's new fiber to customer network will be able to buy different grades of service, ranging from "best-effort" to "mission-critical." Grades of service on the new wholesale network will be sold directly to providers of retail services, who will have the ability to buy four distinct grades of service.
Nucleus Connect, which will operate from two central offices in Singapore, from which retailers can buy wholesale broadband, now says it will offer the differentiated services as part of the "Opennet" framework, which allows retail providers to buy passive optical connections or "lit" service.
The network will support GPON, Ethernet, VoIP, VPN, videoconferencing, leased lines, security, mobile
backhaul and multicast functionality.
Under the new structural separation policy, the Opennet consortium, headed by Axia Netmedia with Singtel, will deploy a passive optical network, while Nucleus Connect, a StarHub unit, will operate the switches and electronics on the network as a wholesale, providing open access to retail service providers.
Though Nucleus Connect initially will be the only “operating company” allowed to operate electronics on the network, other “qualifying companies" will able to do so in the future. Most observers believe such firms will be other international carriers serving business customers in Singapore. Consumer providers are likely to buy active opto-electronics capability from Nucleus Connect.
The broader implications are clear enough. Irrespective of regulatory framework, the notion that end users can buy broadband with four distinct quality-of-service levels is important.
The ability to buy different broadband QoS levels offers a nice way to match end user applications, network demand and service provider revenue more directly. The concept needs to be considered elsewhere, including the United States, as the shape of "network neutrality" rules are weighed.
One wouldn't want to prevent end users from having such choice.
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