Wi-Fi Issues In Venues in Singapore

Solutions on making your conference in Singapore with live-stream fuss-free

Photo of a Livestream Conference in Andaz Singapore 

A research done by Speedtest.net in 2017 has shown that Singapore has some of the fastest internet speeds in the world. Mothership’s article states that an average download speed in Singapore clocks at around 185mbps while upload speeds hovers around 192mbps.

A report by Singapore Business Review (SBR) is titled ‘Singapore Has The Fastest Fixed Broadband Speed In The World’ beating 132 countries.

“So why are we having issues in the landscape of live-streaming? ”

Be it a 200 pax conference in a hotel or organising a webinar in an office, we have encountered numerous enquiries asking if a venue’s internet speed can support a live-stream in high definition. 

Most hotels in Singapore are not brand new. And with brand new hotels, the owners may not see an invested interest in building a solid internet foundation. It is more viable to build more rooms generating substantial revenue to something as intangible as Internet.

Solution 1: Dedicated Wi-Fi

In 2016, the inaugural Fintech Festival was held in Singapore and the Hackcelerator was organised at the Red Dot Museum. The iconic red coloured building in Tanjong Pagar was built in 1928 and subsequently, internet connection was introduced to the building of offices and event space.

Photo of FINTECH Festival by Association Banks of Singapore 

In order to facilitate the 500 pax strong audience and assuming each individual would carry one laptop and one mobile phone, we estimated an average of 800 devices connecting to the internet via wirelessly during the conference. 

The skeptic would say not all devices are connected at the same time so let’s bring that number from 800 devices to a conservative 500 devices. Even when there are 500 devices, this would possibly overload the network (and let’s not discount the fact that some public networks are shared with public).

We brought in an ISP, which in this case was MyRepublic to provide dedicated internet connection to Red Dot Museum to support 1000 devices with a speed of 1GBPS throughout the conference. An internet specialist was on site to monitor speeds and ensure the network do not overload.

Solution 2: The (Not Necessarily) Cheaper Solution

One could suggest that with 4G speeds in Singapore being the world’s fastest (see report from Business Insider Singapore), you could switch your mobile phone hotspot on (or Pocket Wifi), connect to a laptop and operate a live-stream.

Photo by Vodafone

That’s true. However, the truth about 4G speeds is they are dependent on the location and if your hotel of choosing is in the heart of Singapore, it will fluctuate based on usage as well as how many people are logging on to data.

Each Pocket Wifi allows up to 10 devices to connect and remember to keep a charger connected to the device at all time.

“With the influx of the crowd going unto social media during lunch, you might want to avoid using 4G routers during this time.”

Unless you are boosting an unlimited data plan, you might want to consider not volunteering your device as the hotspot.’

Solution 3: The Middle Ground

Most small to medium size conferences don’t have the budget to allocate S$5,000.00 and above for dedicated internet. This does not cover the ISP cost to allocate extra bandwidth to the location as well.

Photo by COMPASS Events

That’s why we started introducing network bonding devices for our conferences.

For clients who are looking to have a global reach via web streaming, this is one of the most popular options.