The island has its problems, but 500 channels with nothing to watch isn’t among them. MTV isn’t available, and only a handful of viewers can ingest subversive ideas from Cable News Network. Singapore is building the world’s most sophisticated optical-fiber network for a different purpose. The 230-square-mile city-state wants to be a giant laboratory for advanced telecommunications. “Singapore has been an entrepot, a switching center for goods and people,” says a top planner. “We want to be a switching center for information, too.”
Fiber-optic cable will link the island’s business districts by the end of 1995, and officials expect it to reach into every home and school by early next decade. That Will put Singapore well ahead of the United States, where telephone and cable firms are running fiber into every neighborhood but will use existing phone or cable wires to get into the home. With the entire country an “intelligent island,” information companies will have a unique opportunity to test services like interactive television and video-telephony. Says Ian McKinnon of Digital Equipment: “We can take what is learned here and remarket the experience on a worldwide basis.”
Singapore is moving quickly because high wages are making the island an expensive place in which to manufacture. The government hopes to supplant handwork with brainwork such as research and development. Its goal is to encourage companies like Hewlett-Packard, which started making computers in Singapore in 1970 and has since turned the country into its Southeast Asian communications hub. HP now has 150 researchers in Singapore, and some of the software to manage the island’s new digital network will be written there.
Other giants of the information age are expanding there, too. Digital Equipment helped set up Comet, a community network that lets users send electronic mail and even consult with doctors. Reuters, the world’s largest supplier of financial information, is convinced that Singapore is an ideal place to test new-age information services. Microsoft made Singapore a showcase for its new Windows NT operating system because the vast network of small computers–combined with the complexities of wiring an entire nation-pushes the software’s limits.
The impact may go far beyond jobs. Singapore’s sternly paternalistic government has recently strengthened film censorship and still forbids private citizens to own satellite dishes. Many Singaporeans suspect that the government is eager to cover the island with fiber in order to monitor the flow of information more closely. The system’s planners insist that they are building in such safe-guards as a new privacy law. All the same, better keep the volume down.
