Striking anomalies contained within Singapore’s performance

Singapore delivers a good performance, although it tumbles two positions to 11th on the Connectivity Scorecard 2010. The fall is largely due to inconsistencies in the country’s consumer and business usage patterns, much like Hong Kong and to a certain extent, Japan and Korea. 

Singapore exhibits strong business usage and skills led by high levels of corporate spending on telecom data services and boasts a high workforce quality. It also has an excellent performance on government-related metrics.

Singapore’s business infrastructure has some strong points such as relatively better enterprise tele-density and a high penetration rate of advanced enterprise-oriented infrastructures such as Ethernet and IP. However, the country has significant room for improvement on other metrics, especially the penetration of personal computers and that of secure internet servers.

It is in the consumer segment that Singapore needs to focus most on improving its performance. Despite a few bright spots such as high 3G connectivity and a high proportion of frequent internet users, its overall performance is rather poor. Singapore’s scores on metrics such as average download speeds and the proportion of IP addresses achieving real-time file-transfer speeds of 5 Mbps or more is rather poor compared to countries such as Japan and Korea. Similarly, its scores in consumer usage and skills are impacted by lower e-commerce and internet banking usage compared to most Northern European countries, although Singapore has comparable or higher broadband penetration.

Despite the inconsistencies in its consumption patterns, there is no doubt that Singapore has immense potential to overtake Japan and take the leadership position among Asian nations once again.

Singapore Connectivity Performance by Scorecard Component