Sorry to flood the list with posts, but I have a million questions. And so far 
only a few answers, and few people to turn to for politco-technical advise in 
singapore ;-)

I am in the process of moving into a flat on Sunday. And volunteered to sort 
out comms.

I come from a heavy network architecture point of view, but need some 
recommendations from people here about the following.

1) ISP choice.

So far I have established there are 5 ISP's (this is a tiny fraction of the 
number in NZ). And I am used to dealing with small Minoe ISP's and knowing 
people who run them. My choice of ISP generally depends on 3 things;

1) Actively Peer at Public Internet Exchanges, and are committed to improving 
global network infrastructure when they can

2) Offer personalised service, without 'valued added' crap (I.e I want a pipe, 
and maybe a /29 subnet, I can deal with a single static IP for the moment 
tho)

3) Quality of service is acceptable (I don't expect to have my ping and RTS 
times fluctuate erratically in peak periods). I don't expect a 5 9 SLA either 
tho, so long as I can reach someone during outages who can not feed me 
bullshit lines as to the problem, I am happy sucking up for the outage 
window.

So these are my observations on the 5. I am leaning towards Pacnet as the can 
offer me Cable with decent upload speed (I need at LEAST 1mbit upstream, down 
is not so important). And I know they actively peer. However I have heard 
mixed things about there QOS, and there support line seems to be manned by 
monkeys... I am hopping I am missing an ISP here... otherwise can anyone 
offer recommendations. I deffinately want to try and avoid either of the 
encumbents (Singtel, and Mediacorp) as they have both done dirty backhanded 
things in terms of international peering arrangements and I have heard there 
filtering is invasive. (Shaping protocols, moving IP's)

Singtel - Government Owned, But offer good range of services
Starhub - Mediacorp Owned, Again good range
Pacnet - Privately Held, but I have heard service levels are not great 
M1 - More Media Corp ownership + Vodaphone
Qala - Only offer ADSL in consumer segment, fibre and frame services are 
heinously expensive

Please add your own observations. (I plan to use this post as a base  to fixup 
the current wikipedia  page).


2) Voip providers. 

I want one thing from a voip provider, that they use standard sip or iax 
protocol that asterisk plays nicely with, and give me a local (Singapore) 
number with compeditive local rates.  Who do people use here for such a 
thing, anyone know a company that offers this (I have seen the above going 
for around 13$ a month sing, but that seems overly expensive considering 
local calls are not free here)


3)
I know that many of the ISP's either monitor or filter content in singapore, I 
have seen it happen to a machine I was admining from NZ which was in 
singapore. Basically I think in this case was singtel, but they deliberately 
forced a very low DHCP renew time on the ADSL connection so that interactive 
services were a pain to use. I also noticed that Bittorrent traffic gets 
shapped a bit (when not tunneled), and the latencys are all over the place 
(which can be the result of too many clients on a single DSLAM or stream 
monitoring...)

What do people know of the methods employed here by ISP's to filter/tamper 
with service ?



Any comments much appreciated.



Kind regards

JoelW


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