3G Sucks In Singapore

Perhaps the most common complain that you can hear these days is the woeful state of the mobile 3G service in Singapore. No service provider is spared from the scorching comments from their customers.

So what had happened? Simply look at your favourite Telco's mobile phone offerings. Almost every phone offered these days are smart phones. The explosive popularity of smart phones in Singapore has completely outstrip the telco's ability to provide 3G data to then. Remember, Smart phones in Singapore uses the 3G service to quench their ever growing thirst for more data bandwidth.

For every user checking out their Facebook walls, whatsapp messages, words with friends, draw something, and twitter feeds, the more data bandwidth is required to connect to the internet.

Now the interesting part is that i suspect that the telco are using the same base stations that they has already previously installed all over Singapore for GSM service, for the 3G service. For each base station, it has an independent link to the internet. This link is shared among all the users in the area connected to the base station.

This means if there are too many smart phones users in the area, the base station will simply run out of data bandwidth while still showing full bars for 3G. Remember the bars are meant to show signal strength, not speed.

This is based on something that i am observing almost everyday. During peak hours, every time a fully packed train pulls into the station, internet days traffic went from ok to totally dead. As soon as the train pulls away, my internet connection confess back to life. Also every time I stray near AMK hub, my data connection drops dead as well. In both scenarios, the 3G bars are at a healthy max level.

So the i hope this explains why your mobile device simply don't hook up to the internet during peak hour in the train or stall in a busy shopping centre.

This might also be the reason why i never came close to busting the 12gb data limit imposed by my data plan from Stinktel.

As every telco had the same issue, the only solution is to move on to 4G as Laghub and M1 fare no better either. Or maybe we can force the telco to stop charging us a premium for 3G when they cannot provide sufficient data bandwidth at their end of the bargain.