Nucleus Connect, the wholesale carrier in Singapore’s ground-breaking NBN project, is on track to launch commercial service in Q3.
Nucleus Connect GM for commercial services, Malcolm Rodriques, told CommunicAsia Show Daily that he’s been told by his CEO that that date “is not going to slide. Internally we face a lot of pressure, but everything seems to be coming along on schedule.”
At launch he said fiber coverage is expected to be about 50% of Singapore – both residential and non-residential. “Then we’ll offer the basic 100-Mbps and 1-Gbps access to homes and businesses.”
The StarHub-owned firm has already launched co-location and interoperability testing services, which service providers take-up in advance of launch date so they can start to install equipment into their central offices (COs) and test their applications.
Asked about cooperating with OpenNet, which is backed by rival Singapore Telecom, he admitted the company was “always concerned” because the central office was co-located in SingTel exchanges.
“But it’s been pretty good so far and according to our schedule,” he said.
Rodriques said Nucleus was still working with OpenNet on sorting out end-to-end processes. “A three-layer model is more complicated than a two-layer model, because you have extra handoffs from the RSP to the opco to the netco.”