Several popular mobile operators in Singapore, including SingTel (News - Alert) and StarHub, have decided to raise both the price and quality of entry-level 4G data plans for smartphone customers. While the quality of service is increased significantly and coverage is expected to expand as well, prices are rising dramatically – especially for additional data. These changes in price are scheduled to take effect on Friday, which is coincidentally the same day as the iPhone (News - Alert) 6 launches internationally.
The iPhone 6 and it's big brother, the iPhone 6 Plus, has received a lot of attention in Asian markets, even several months before it had been officially announced. The larger screen real estate had been something that the Asian iPhone market had been asking for some time now, and now that it has arrived consumers will likely need bigger data plans to soak up even more information.
To take advantage of this data demand in Asia, Singapore's mobile operators are increasing prices, but increasing service as well. Not only are data speeds faster (with StarHub claiming a peak download rate of 300Mb/s), but regular SMS and voice minute limits have also been improved across the board.
One price point that has increased significantly is the fee for an extra gigabyte of monthly data, which has nearly doubled. Assumedly, the reasoning here is that fewer customers will need to add additional gigabytes of data since the entry-level plan includes 3GB of data monthly.
By the end of the year, StarHub plans to increase the number of 4G base stations it operates by 70 percent, which indicates that the company is rapidly trying to improve wireless service as much as possible in preparation for the iPhone 6 and other products that will be using the same technology.
Edited by Alisen Downey