Singapore-based ViewQwest will offer a 2Gbps residential fiber broadband bundle in early 2015, in its bid to capture a larger share of Singapore’s competitive residential broadband market.
The company, one of Singapore’s smaller fiber broadband providers, currently offers a top-tier fiber broadband bundle with speeds up to 1Gbps.
The 2Gbps service will be the first of its kind offered outside of Japan and will be delivered over ViewQwest’s existing GPON (Gigabit-Capable Passive Optical Networks) infrastructure; the GPON standard supports up to 2Gbps downstream and 1Gbps upstream.
Target customers of the new service are power Internet users who stream ultra high definition content to multiple devices on their home network. These same users will demand the high Internet speed and reliability afforded by the 2Gbps service, ViewQwest CEO Vignessa Moorthy told reporters.
The 2Gbps fiber broadband service will first be trialed till year-end among a select group of 20-30 existing ViewQwest customers before commercial rollout.
ViewQwest derives some 70% of its revenue from business customers, but its attempts to attract consumers, particularly fans of overseas-based multimedia content, have resulted in several actions on its part. Chief among these is the Freedom VPN service offered to consumers, an ISP-level service which allows users to bypass content access restrictions imposed by media streaming services to certain geographic regions.
ViewQwest also moved to improve connectivity between Singapore and the United States, where many major content streaming services are based, by establishing two PoPs (Point of Presence) in the country this year. Located in Los Angeles’s “Any2” peering facility and Telehouse’s New York Internet Exchange in New York, the PoPs are expected to provide ViewQwest with greater control over how traffic is routed from between Singapore and the United States.