A florist and a recruitment firm. These are only two of the many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that have benefited from the ongoing roll-out of Singapore’s all-fibre, ultra-high-speed broadband network. And their experience suggests that next year may be a year in which many more SMEs here can look forward to higher productivity and lower costs.

“Previously, we were on a six-megabit plan and we had a lot of people sharing this broadband,” said Mr Ryan Chioh, managing director of Far East Flora. As a result, Far East’s customer service officers, who took orders on the phone and via the Internet, were not able to respond fast enough to customers, he added.

And then came the Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network (NGNBN). The NGNBN project was launched by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore as part of the Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) master plan in 2006. The aim was to make Singapore an info-communications hub by delivering speeds of at least one gigabit per second to all homes, offices and schools.

Last year, Far East made use of NGNBN to upgrade its broadband speed to 100 megabits per second, for about $300 a month. A few years ago, the price for a similar speed would have been about five to 10 times more. The new plan, Mr Chioh said, has cut the response time dramatically.

At Capita Staffing and Research, a recruitment and human-resource consulting company, NGNBN has allowed access to faster Internet speeds at an affordable cost.

“We are now using more video-conferencing across our different offices and with our clients, which helps us save time,” said Mr Francis Koh, managing director of the company.

Mr Nicholas Ng, director of commercial business at Cisco in Singapore, said: “NGNBN has made the world flat for small and medium enterprises in Singapore as they use the network as a platform to transform their business, services level and product. It allows SMEs to focus on their core business competency.”

As they focus on running their business, SMEs “can cut down on upfront capital investments for software licensing”, said Ms Sherlin Pang, research manager at IDC Asia-Pacific, which tracks the information and communications industry.

SMEs can instead make use of the high-speed network to connect to servers around the world on which the so-called “cloud-based” applications, such as salesforce.com, reside.

By making available Internet-based pay-as-you-use software for everything from accounting to spam filtering and data analytics, cloud computing “exposes SMEs to applications or services that probably only the larger enterprises had access to”, Ms Pang added.

IDC estimates the cloud-computing market in Singapore to grow almost 50 per cent to US$63 million ($81.3 million) next year.

Commercial services to consumers on NGNBN were officially launched in the third quarter of this year, with fibre coverage of Singapore scheduled to hit 60 per cent by year-end. Going into next year, coverage will become more pervasive, heading towards a target of 95 per cent by mid-2012.

The expansion in coverage is expected to create a larger market for so-called retail service providers (RSP).

Nucleus Connect, which was appointed to design, build and operate the active infrastructure, aims to at least double the number of RSPs next year. The current six are SingTel, M1, StarHub, LGA, ViewQwest and SuperInternet. With more RSPs joining the fray, prices may become even more affordable, encouraging SMEs to upgrade their connections.

As the network coverage extends to cover more homes and offices, there will be more incentives for RSPs to “further innovate with new broadband services and offerings, with SMEs benefiting from greater vibrancy and competition”, said Mr Khoong Hock Yun, assistant chief executive for infrastructure and services development at the IDA.

SMEs are a preferred target segment for RSPs. Unlike bigger, more established firms, which prefer to use bespoke software solutions and are paranoid about data security, SMEs are more open to adopting new technologies, if they are cheap.

SingTel is among the telcos that will roll out a wider range of cloud-computing products next year to tap the SME market. Its competitors StarHub and M1 have similar plans.

SingTel’s products, which will be launched on an online portal in the first half of next year, may include solutions for human resource and logistics management, said Mr Dumas Chin, vice-president for business sales at SingTel. According to the telco’s estimates, such cloud computing services could help companies save up to 90 per cent of costs on overheads, maintenance and IT support.

“We’re going to look at more specific needs,” Mr Chin said, adding that these applications could be for both back-office requirements and core business functions. The idea is to “help companies reap the benefits of productivity gains and cost controls.

Source:-http://www.todayonline.com/Business/EDC101231-0000059/SMEs-to-boost-productivity-with-NGNBN