This article originally appeared on Vulcan Post.
As 1 gigabits per second (Gbps) broadband plans gain popularity, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) have announced that they will be conducting an official study on 1Gbps plans to see how effective they really are.
1Gbps plans have become more widely adopted since MyRepublic began offering it at $49.99/month. Other Internet service providers have since slashed their prices to match, with M1’s 1Gbps plan being the cheapest at $39.90/month.
According to The Straits Times, the IDA is looking for third party contractors to measure the actual speeds of these popular plans. A current study, which started in May 2012, was commissioned to British-based firm SamKnows, but is limited to studying plans with speeds of up to 200Mbps. Fibre-broadband speeds are measured by plugging probes into the modems and routers of about 900 volunteers in Singapore.
For the 1Gbps plans, however, the IDA is looking at recruiting 1,500 volunteers. To make sure that the studies are fairly conducted, test servers to measure broadband users’ access to websites will be randomly changed every month.
“With the increasing take-up of 1Gbps fibre-broadband service plans by end users in Singapore, it will be timely to include these plans in the measurement,” said an IDA spokesperson to The Straits Times.
The study will begin in September of this year, with results published monthly on IDA’s website, so interested members of the public can check in to see what the studies are saying about their broadband plans. The results of the current study can be found here.
With so many players in the market, customers are taking the quality of their service seriously. Yesterday’s Internet outage, which was caused by MRT construction, drew flak from netizens who saw disruption from all major Internet providers. It’s about time to settle, once and for all, who has the best broadband service.