StarHub had launched its 5G network in the country in 2020
Singaporean telco StarHub said its outdoor 5G network has achieved over 99% coverage nearly four years after the carrier introduced 5G technology.
In 2020, StarHub’s 5G service only had 50% of network coverage across the country.
Talking about the coverage milestone, StarHub’s chief executive officer Nikhil Eapean said the telco will continue to provide Singaporeans with fast and reliable connectivity and even greater network coverage.
In April of 2020, Singtel and a joint venture between StarHub Mobile and M1 had secured licenses to build two nationwide standalone (SA) 5G networks in Singapore. The winners were each allocated 100 megahertz of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band.
Last year, StarHub embarked upon a multi-cloud network transformation project to boost the delivery, scalability, and performance of its mobile, broadband, and entertainment services. AWS, Google Cloud, NAVER Cloud, and Nokia had been appointed for support in this initiative. The project was dubbed Cloud Infinity and will deliver a “low-latency” and “simplified” architecture for more dynamic telecoms services, the telco said.
The Cloud Infinity initiative will deliver “sustainable business growth” and “massive cost savings” for running its network operations, said StarHub. It described the project as “uniquely conceptualized” and “the first of its kind in the world”. Cloud Infinity builds on an additional investment of up to $40 million in its five-year DARE+ growth scheme, geared to strengthen “cost rationalization” and “prime it for sustainable business growth in the long term”.
StarHub had said it was expecting to launch a secure cloud-brokerage marketplace called Cloud-X “in the near future” to offer sovereign cloud services, custom-built for local data privacy and security, to government agencies and enterprises. In a major way, the Cloud Infinity project was geared to monetize mobile and fixed broadband services with enterprises.
The company said: “StarHub… will adopt a highly-scalable and access-agnostic hybrid cloud architecture, which allows the company to co-develop platforms and solutions with enterprises and differentiate services through low-latency multi-access technologies such as 5G and 10Gbps. While cloudifying its own network functions, StarHub has also collaborated… to jointly develop ultra-low latency cloud, communication, and entertainment services.”
Ayush Sharma, chief technology officer at StarHub, had said: “Having embarked on DARE+ in 2021, we… are no longer just achieving project milestones, but going beyond telco to set new benchmarks for the entire industry. Cloud Infinity will serve as a cradle of innovation for our enterprise and consumer businesses, allowing us to deliver the market’s most unique, meaningful, and enriching products and services with speed and reliability.”