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Tuesday, May 05, 2015
[Two become one...] I caught Avengers 2 with my wife recently. Before the movie started, there was a commercial for Starhub’s home dual broadband service. This offering, I thought, was brilliant, for reasons I will go into later. (This, by the way, is not a sponsored post. I have way too little hits to get sponsored.) There was a couple next to us. The girlfriend/wife asked the boyfriend/husband why would anyone need two connections. The boyfriend/husband’s response was epic. “From an engineering perspective, *something I couldn’t catch* is unstable so that’s why they provide two connections. One for back-up.” I bit my lip. Hard. It was either that or I get up and slap the guy. “From an engineering perspective”, indeed. From your response, you’re clearly not an engineer. If you are, you’re shit. This offering from Starhub is not because there’s something unstable. This offering, in fact, is absolutely brilliant. Anyone who checks out the information on their website would get an idea why, but I’ll go into more details here. Most recent BTO flats these days have the same design. I won’t go into the details, and for the rest of this post, I’d assume the reader knows what the design is. Five, four, and even three-room flats all follow the same design somewhat, so all of them suffer from the same problem (three-room flats perhaps to a lesser extent). Most consumers subscribe to a fibre broadband service for their homes. The ISP will provide a modem and a router that also provides WiFi signals. Sometimes, it’s all all-in-one device. In any case, consumers usually end up placing this device near the circuit-breaker, next to the main door, as that is where the fibre termination point is. Either there, or near the TV, where HDB has kindly provided an extended network connection to from the circuit-breaker/fibre termination point area. In short, most consumers are using the default equipment provided by their ISP, placed in the living room, for WiFi coverage that’s supposed to cover their whole flat. You don’t really have a choice in this matter, due to the location of the fibre termination point and existing network connection provided by HDB. Speaking as someone who’s living in one of such flats, I can assure you that the master bedroom, being the furthest from the living room, will have issues with the WiFi coverage. Some people (with networking/IT knowledge) would have anticipated this problem and would have done something about it, but most people don’t fall into this category. The technician from the ISP would have set everything up and the issue only surfaces when the flat owner goes to bed at night and wanted to check their emails one last time. Enter Starhub. The problem with the fibre termination point is that there is only one such point in the flat. You can’t really change its location, and it’s not cost-effective and can be ugly to install additional points. It’s usually next to the main door. Starhub’s cable point is different. There is a point in almost every room (including the bomb shelter). You can place their networking equipment practically anywhere you want. Hence, by hooking up their cable broadband in the master bedroom, your whole flat would be covered nicely, WiFi-wise. And this is perfect for most consumers who basically just need WiFi. This probably won’t work very well for techie people, as these are two separate networks and you can’t share network resources this way. But it works for the mass market. This is a perfect example of Starhub exploiting its competitive advantage. Something their competitors will not be able to offer, and I think it is absolutely brilliant. So no, Starhub is not offering this because something is “unstable”. ^^^ by Locksley @ 10:02 PM.
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Broken for now. :( If anyone knows of a good way to display tweets without using Twitter's awful looking widgets, please let me know. Preferably something that allows me to retrieve my tweets in plain-text format.
Anything and everything under the sun. I write about my day, my thoughts, things I see in public, things to get off my chest, or sometimes just some senseless rants that make sense only to me. 30 year old male. Always with too many ideas in his head and too little time. For my 15 minutes of fame, I want to be a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman. Movies, TV, cycling, computers, planted tanks, cherry shrimps, P2P legal issues, Manchester United, WWE, TNA, UFC, etc... Best viewed @ 1280*1024 or above. Views are expressed are mine and mine only, and are not meant to offend or influence anyone. Designed for readers with a sense of humour. If you can't laugh at yourself, you probably won't like my style of humour. |