Dropped Net connections may soon be history with Jurong trial

SINGAPORE — From the third quarter, the Jurong Lake District will be the site for a trial to fix the common problem of Internet connections dropping when one enters the lift or goes to a basement car park.

Regulators want to see a day where people can surf on the move without disruptions, which will involve making mobile devices’ Internet connection slide across different types of networks, such as from home Wi-Fi to their telcos’ 4G to public Wi-Fi.

Illustrating this, the Infocomm Development Authority’s (IDA) assistant chief executive officer Khoong Hock Yun said at a briefing today (April 22): “So from home to school or work, users can still carry on their activities even when they ... go to the basement car parks or when they go through the tunnels.”

Testing of the switching between networks on this Heterogeneous Network infrastructure (or HetNet) will run until the end of the year at places like lifts, pedestrian walkways, bus interchanges and MRT stations within the Jurong Lake District. Running optimally, HetNet will theoretically ease overall network congestion.

All three telcos — Singtel, StarHub and M1 — and fibre broadband service provider MyRepublic will be involved in the trial, said the IDA today.

Switching between each telco’s cellular and public Wi-Fi networks, as well as across the Wi-Fi networks they each operate — Wireless@SG is operated by different telcos, depending on location — will be tested. Switching of cellular networks across telcos, however, will not, due to the absence of a “robust commercial framework” for pricing — which the IDA is counting on the industry to sort out — said Mr Khoong.

Each telco and MyRepublic will have its own test circuit within the district, although these areas might overlap, said the IDA.

A potential benefit of HetNet, said IDA executive deputy chairman Steve Leonard, is in the area of healthcare — for instance, heart patients who need to be monitored remotely.

“We cannot have a drop. If we have a healthcare environment, someone is being monitored, do we lose connectivity with that person?” he said, at a briefing today.

The HetNet trial is one part of Singapore’s wider push to become a smart nation. Work has also begun on developing the Smart Nation Platform, which will create a nationwide sensor network and data analytics abilities. 

Phase one of the platform has been deployed, including starting work on a data centre.

MyRepublic, which currently does not have its own cellular network, will be spending approximately S$5 million to invest in a network for the trial, TODAY understands. Last week, SMRT said it is entering the race with MyRepublic for the Republic’s fourth telco licence.

Asked if their inclusion in the trials is seen as a boost to their chances, MyRepublic chief operating officer Greg Mittman said: “Being involved in the HetNet trial gives us the opportunity to testbed our network concept on a small scale, so by the end of it we’ll be far more capable of applying it on a larger scale. This makes our proposal more robust.”