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MyRepublic offers 3 new mobile plans, eyes 5 per cent market share

This article is more than 12 months old

A fourth virtual telco has entered the growing mobile space here, with Internet service provider MyRepublic offering consumers three new mobile plans yesterday.

The move comes a month after the company first offered mobile services to its existing broadband customers.

The mobile plans start from $35 for 7GB of monthly high-speed data, followed by a 12GB high-speed data plan for $55 and 25GB for $85.

MyRepublic chief executive Malcolm Rodrigues said the company plans to corner 5 per cent of the market share for mobile users here, which translates to about 200,000 users.

"We launched our service a month ago to existing customers and had a really good take-up," he said.

"People have switched from the incumbents to new operators and the door is open for us to take customers."

The company's plans come as the mobile market starts heating up with the planned entry of a fourth full-fledged telco in Singapore. Australia-based company TPG Telecom is expected to arrive in the Singapore market in the coming months.

MyRepublic, which started as a fibre broadband provider in 2011, lost out to TPG in its bid to be the fourth telco in 2016.

MyRepublic's move into the virtual telco space is a "low-investment, low-risk but also low-margin business," said analyst Quah Mei Lee, the Asia-Pacific industry principal of telecoms and payments at Frost & Sullivan.

MyRepublic will lease network capacity from StarHub to offer consumer mobile services under a "thick" mobile virtual network operator model, where radio base stations for coverage are set up by StarHub but core network functions are handled by MyRepublic.

This sort of model is the first of its kind in Singapore, said the company.

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