SINGAPORE, July 8 — Singapore’s insatiable appetite to share photos on Facebook, Twitter and other social media has sparked the need to release more mobile broadband spectrum, opening the way for more competition in the saturated market.

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore said yesterday it proposed releasing more spectrum, which will allow a fourth carrier into the market. The regulator has been seeking industry feedback since April 2014 to find a solution to growing mobile data traffic in the island nation, whose 5.5 million residents are ranked as the most active users of social media in the Asia Pacific region.

Fresh competition for Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, StarHub Ltd and M1 Ltd will bring down the cost of mobile Internet access and improve the service in the city-state, the IDA said. With half of the country’s residents carrying at least two devices, download speeds at commercial buildings in and around the bustling Raffles Place central business district have slowed, according to a survey conducted by the Straits Times newspaper last month.

The cost of wireless phone service is also more expensive in Singapore than in Hong Kong, South Korea and China, according to a 2014 report by the World Economic Forum.

Among those welcoming the prospect of a fourth operator is Houy In, a 23-year-old photographer who primarily uses his home connection to upload photos to an online storage system to avoid exceeding his monthly mobile data limit of 3 gigabytes.

Multiple subscriptions

“If a new player can offer unlimited data access for mobile users, I’m able to share usage with my other devices when I’m at home as well as when I’m out,” Houy said. “That means I will only need one Internet subscription.”

Singapore’s mobile-phone penetration rate was 148 per cent in 2014, compared with 93 per cent a decade earlier, according to the regulator’s data, as some people have multiple subscriptions. High-speed mobile data subscribers on third- or fourth-generation and commercial Wi-Fi networks reached 10.1 million in the first quarter of this year, almost double the city’s population, according to the regulator.

“We’ve hit a saturation point in terms of the consumer business,” Carey Wong, an analyst at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp, said by phone before the announcement. “Data growth isn’t significant to make up for the decline in revenue from voice and text-messaging.”

Adding a fourth mobile-phone operator will give Singapore more carriers than China or Japan, which both have far greater populations. Still, with the nation occupying less than 300 square miles of land and existing infrastructure, rolling out another network would be far cheaper than the billions of dollars needed in larger countries.

Selling point

Aspiring mobile operators MyRepublic Ltd and Consistel have both said providing unlimited wireless data use would be a key selling point for new services.

MyRepublic, which started its Internet service in 2011 and now has 35,000 fixed broadband subscribers, plans to spend S$250 million (RM702.6 million) to build its mobile network, according to Managing Director Yap Yong Teck. The service would utilise existing national broadband infrastructure that links every Singapore residential and commercial building through a fibre-optic network.

“We see an opportunity in the market to build a mobile network in the same way we built our fixed network,” Yap said. “With unlimited data, people should not worry about connectivity and bursting their data bundles.”

Consistel, a network systems integrator, would invest as much as S$1 billion on its network and focus on improving high- speed access in commercial buildings, Chairman Masoud Bassiri said.

Seamless goal

“Subscribers are looking for more value for money, with better quality of service or much faster speeds,” Bassiri said in an interview. “The technology we have is going to deliver that.”

The three incumbents said they are ready for more competition.

“SingTel is no newcomer to competition,” the company said in an e-mailed statement. “We stay committed to our customers and will continue to invest in areas that ultimately matter to them.”

MyRepublic sees an opportunity for growth through the government’s goal of transforming the city-state into a network of smart devices seamlessly connected through the national broadband network.

“If Singapore gets the infrastructure right, we become the tip of the spear for the next wave of technological innovation,” MyRepublic Chief Operating Officer Greg Mittman said in an interview. “People who start a business in Silicon Valley would want to move to Singapore because our telecom infrastructure is ahead of California.” — Bloomberg