Looking Back – Building Strong Foundations by Leong Keng Thai & Chia Aileen

Looking Back - Building Strong Foundations

By Leong Keng Thai & Chia Aileen

The development and growth of Singapore’s telecommunication sector has come a long way over the past 50 years. From the 1970s, when the Telecommunication Authority of Singapore (TAS) was set-up to provide citizens with access to reliable and dependable telecommunication services and to help drive the development of telecommunication as an essential infrastructure for the country’s economic and social development; to the privatisation of SingTel in 1992 that paved the way for the subsequent liberalisation of the telecommunications market in 2001; to today where household penetration for fibre broadband and mobile is 95% and 153% respectively, and the infocommunication (infocomm) media sector in 2016 contributed about 8.6% of Singapore’s nominal value-add and employed a significant 5.3% of the workforce.