S'pore NBN means business for LGA Telecom
SINGAPORE--A retail service provider (RSP) for Singapore's next-generation national broadband network (NBN), LGA Telecom is targeting its services exclusively at the enterprise market and bundling business collaborative tools, says a company executive, who notes that its competitors' services are consumer-led.
In an interview with ZDNet Asia, LGA chief executive Daniel Ang, said the company released its price plan later than the rest of the RSPs because it did not want its services to be confused with the other consumer-targeted packages.
Currently, LGA's offering is priced at a promotional fee of S$298 (US$229.49) per month which includes a 100Mbps corporate line access and a 100Mbps residential line access. Additional residential lines are available at S$39 (US$30.03) per month for up to five users.
The company will also waive the standard one-time charge, said Ang.
Apart from pricing, he said LGA's offerings differ from its competitors because the company provides "mission-critical" level services. Other players provide only "best-effort" services, he noted, adding that he based this theory on price comparison and lack of mention regarding mission-critical service level.
Listed first by the highest service level, the four classes of service quality for its NBN services are real-time, near real-time, mission-critical and best-effort.
LGA's S$298 package is targeted at small and midsize businesses (SMBs), and includes a free business collaboration suite that comprises e-mail, instant messaging, document sharing, calendar and address book, said Ang,
The company also has a higher-end price package for enterprises looking for managed services such as firewall, VPN (virtual private network), network monitoring and maintenance.
According to Ang, enterprises will embrace NBN faster than SMBs because these larger companies require mission-critical level services more than their smaller counterparts.
The main function of Internet for SMBs is still to support e-mail, he said, adding that bandwidth requirements are driven by demand for videos, for example, enterprises digitalizing their manuals into videos.
He expects the adoption of fiber connection among SMBs to be similar to fax machines, where enterprises were among the initial adopters of fax machines as SMBs did not see the need for one. Fax machines eventually became a necessity even for smaller players, which needed a way to correspond with the larger organizations, he said.