Compete With Telcos? You Must Be Crazy! Singapore Startup MyRepublic is Doing Just That

Management team of MyRepublic

MyRepublic is an internet service provider in Singapore that provides high-speed fibre optic web connections for consumers and enterprises. It celebrated its one year anniversary last week and its numbers look sexy. I met the founders to find out more.

After its first year of operation, it has a team of 32 full time staff, 450 resellers of their services, around 10,000 paying subscribers, more than five million Singapore dollars in revenue, and is expected to be profitable by May this year. These are very good stats for a new startup.

Singapore has three telcos: SingTel, Starhub and M1, who own the lion’s share of the market. They are the main providers for mobile, cable TV, and internet services in Singapore. Startups who intend to compete with these telcos, which make billions in profit each year, would normally be courting doom battling telecos with huge marketing budgets and extensive distribution channels.

The window of opportunity

In 2006, the Singaporean government launched the ‘Intelligent Nation 2015’ master plan. Part of this plan is to upgrade the national network infrastructure to ultra high-speed fibre broadband network throughout Singapore. This National Broadband Network (NBN) initiative presented a window of opportunity for new entrants to the traditionally telco-monopolized internet services provider (ISP) business. MyRepublic founders saw this and pounced.

KC Lai, co-founder of MyRepublic, tells us:

In the past, when operators want to start up in the infrastructure business, they needed one billion dollars. Without one billion, you can forget about it. With the NBN initiatives, the government paid the one billion to get the infrastructure up.

MyRepublic has three co-founders, Greg Mittman, Malcolm Rodrigues, and KC Lai. All of them were senior management executives working in or with telecoms and handled NBN projects in their respective jobs. They understood the initiative very well. The other early employees of MyRepublic are also made up of people with strong background in the telecoms.

MyRepublic focuses on providing the NBNs infrastructure to consumers. Their products include this fibre internet connection with speeds up to 150 MBps and also Teleport, an over-the-top video streamer that allows consumers to stream popular US dramas and other content that’s usually geo-restricted to other countries. Currently, consumers need to subscribe to telcos for a TV set-top box to watch these dramas.

Malcolm Rodrigues explains:

We are fortunate that this NBN opportunity exists. We are in the right place and right time to be a part of it. Now, many Singaporeans are switching to fibre. There’s a pent-up frustration that people have [with their ISPs]. For years, they switch from Starhub to Singtel and Singtel to Starhub looking for something better and not finding it. Now there is fibre which is so much better, so much faster and clearer. It’s an easy sale.