Singapore today launched a Digital Connectivity Blueprint, which outlines the strategic priorities and investment in emerging areas to keep pace with the country’s connectivity needs.

Developed in consultation with an Advisory Panel on Digital Infrastructure and industry partners, the blueprint serves as a foundation upon which Singapore realises better opportunities for growth and jobs, stronger trust in its digital infrastructure, and empowered communities.

"By integrating our digital connectivity plans across the hard, physical-digital, and soft layers, we hope Singapore can enhance its standing as a technology hub. This will also put us in a better position to seize opportunities from emerging tech trends, such as the rise of generative AI, autonomous systems, and immersive multi-party interactions," says Josephine Teo, Singapore’s Minister for Communications and Information, at the Asia Tech x Singapore 2023 event today.

She continues: “The blueprint is a tangible investment in the future of Singapore. [Its aim] is to breathe new life and seed new innovations in our economy and society through the collective efforts of the public and private sectors... [and] to uplift people through the jobs and businesses that they engage with.”

Strengthening the digital infrastructure stack

The Digital Connectivity Blueprint will look at strengthening the city-state’s digital infrastructure stack consisting of hard, physical-digital, and soft infrastructure through five strategic priorities:

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<ol><li>Provide capacity to enable international submarine cable landings to double within the next 10 years Singapore will intensify the use of available space and landing resources so that operators can expand and further diversify the network of submarine cables. This will potentially catalyse at least $10 billion in overall submarine cable investments.</li><li>Build seamless end-to-end 10 Gbps domestic connectivity within the next five years To do so, the city-state will facilitate a ten-fold increase to the nationwide fibre broadband network (NBN), allocate spectrum for faster Wi-Fi networks, and allocate spectrum to 5G standalone networks to enhance performance and encourage enterprises to adopt it. These moves are expected to enable connectivity to “move” seamlessly between outdoor and indoor environments. </li><li>Ensure resilience and security of compute infrastructure as it becomes increasingly critical to everyday digital services. Singapore will work with cloud and data centre providers to enhance the transparency and accountability for resilience and security risks in compute infrastructure, aligned with international best practices. </li><li>Pioneer a roadmap for the growth of new green data centres This will help expand the capacity for the digital economy while ensuring environmental sustainability. This new capacity could require private investments of $10 to 12 billion.</li><li>Drive greater adoption of the Singapore Digital Utility (DU) Stack to expand the benefits of seamless digital transactions. Designed to provide soft infrastructure to enable digital transactions, the DU stack starts with identity, payments and invoicing before extending to the verification of documents and exchange of data. Singapore will explore new use cases across industries for the current DUs and identify emergent DUs to further enhance the stack.</li></ul>

Moves into new frontiers

Singapore will make moves in four nascent areas too.

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Firstly, it will advance the vision of a quantum-safe Singapore within the next decade. Since quantum computers can solve a complex problem for classical computers in just minutes, they could have a significant impact on encryption, hashing and public key algorithms we use to protect our data today. It is, therefore, crucial to explore and deploy quantum-safe technology before quantum computers become pervasive and be used by bad actors to decrypt sensitive data in the future.

Secondly, the city-state will put in place foundations for pervasive autonomy as it has the second highest industrial robot density globally, according to the International Federation of Robotics. It will do so by improving the reliability and security of devices and networks through standards setting, fostering interoperability through intervention at the middleware layer (such as the Robotics Middleware Framework), and bringing ecosystem players together through the orchestration of pilots and use cases.

Thirdly, Singapore will look at greening software as greening the hard IT infrastructure alone will not be enough to offset the upcoming rise in emissions. It will build an ecosystem of stakeholders, including industry and research institutions, through testbeds and sandboxes to move green software development, standards and measurement forward.

Finally, the city-state will enable innovative solutions in key industries with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite services. The added high-bandwidth connectivity provided by LEO satellite technologies is expected to open up opportunities for innovation, especially in the maritime and aviation sectors. Despite being a key satellite connectivity node, Singapore will enhance this by ensuring sufficient spectrum resources for satellite systems and developing pro-enterprise frameworks and policies.

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Updated on June 5, 2023, at 5.26pm to include quotes from Minister Josephine Teo

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