Short-term internet

[handels]

The apartment we recently moved in to is wired for Starhub according to the landlords. We called OpenNet and they told us our building is actually wired for fibre, but not our apartment.

We've asked the landlord to allow us to pay to have the apartment wired for fibre, but best case scenario this wouldn't be done for another 5 weeks.

Starhub's website says there is only a $35 cancellation fee for their lower cost plans, but when we called them they told us it's actually $400 which is a bit much to use them short-term.

Does anyone:

1. Know of an ISP that has short-term plans or lower cancellation fees?
2. Have a contract that expires in the next few months that you are looking to transfer?
3. Know of any internet cafes or hotspots near Kovan or Serangoon? I googled but didn't see anything promising.

Thanks very much for your help!

[zzm9980]

No good suggestions other than to tether your laptop to your phone? This is better if you have LTE.

[handels]

Thanks, I did try with my BB but the signal was intermittent. Maybe I can find a sweet spot in the apartment but it would be nice to have a more reliable connection.

Does anyone know how reliable fibre service from MyRepublic is? Perhaps I could rationalize keeping Starhub as a backup if MyRepublic has outages?

[zzm9980]

The ISPs all use the same physical fiber network, from OpenNet. So any physical problem will likely affect all providers equally. The only differences will be ISP specific such routing, DNS, throttling, etc. Of course the differences will matter, but not as much as say Starhub cable vs Singtel DSL.

That all said, and considering myself rather technically competent, once fiber is available where I live I won't consider any ISP except SuperInternet. You can read old posts in the Computer forum about it, or check out other local Singapore IT-specific forums (such as Hardwarezone).

[handels]

Thanks, I will check them out. My husband did the fibre research and I don't even know if that was one of the options he considered. He chose MyRepublic as he read that they don't traffic-shape as some of the other providers do.

Researching today, I have found that M1 has 6 month contracts and also offers pre-paid mobile broadband per hour and per day (additional charge for mobile cards for laptops). Hopefully one of these will get us through the gap before fibre is ready.

Thanks again for your input!

[taxico]

starhub cable internet has a pay as you go plan (charged per day i think).

fibre may take longer than the specified 5 weeks. a friend's place just got hooked up after an almost 3-month wait (he signed up during the last computer fair).

[zzm9980]

My husband did the fibre research and I don't even know if that was one of the options he considered. He chose MyRepublic as

Honestly, I didn't look into MyRepublic. It sounds like they're pretty similar to SuperInternet, setting themselves apart from the big 3 (Singtel, Starhub, M1) by advertising real customer support and their realistic bandwidth limitations, not theoretical. I'd compare the two and look at them both.

One more thing that your husband may care about the big 3 - all of them do outbound HTTP caching and proxying. There is no simple way around this besides using a VPN or SSH Tunnel. It can mess with all kinds of applications in various ways. I've found myself banned from various forums at various points (because of the proxy IPs), found I couldn't use the Starcraft 2 online installer without a headache, and a few other things. Rumor is at one point no one on Singtel was allowed to edit Wikipedia.

[handels]

Just to update for anyone else with this issue, we got:

Starhub
3 month plan,
89$ for the cable modem,
16 Mbps down / 2 Mbps upload
just under 60$ per month.
No cancelation fee or activation fee
free cable tv (20 channels) for 3 months included

So, I think the key here is to call the companies and ask what their short- term packages are, as this type of thing doesn't seem to be on the websites.