Digital Infrastructure

The Foundational Role of Digital Infrastructure

Digital infrastructure – the submarine cables laid across ocean floors, satellites in space, optical fibre cables laid underground, mobile base stations on rooftops – is often unseen. Yet, it is the ‘invisible foundation’ upon which our digital economy and digital society are built. It undergirds our people’s access to digital services and interactions on digital platforms, and enterprises’ ability to transform their operations to drive greater productivity and growth.

MDDI’s Approach to Building Digital Infrastructure

MDDI’s approach toward building Singapore’s digital infrastructure centres on three core tenets.

1. Making forward-looking investments – investing ahead of demand so that Singapore is ready to embrace opportunities when technological trends (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, autonomous systems, immersive experiences, distributed cloud, quantum technologies) mature, and has the capacity to deal with unexpected challenges (e.g., the surge in digital interactions during a pandemic).
   

2. Taking a holistic view of the digital infrastructure stack –looking beyond traditional connectivity to plan for the entire ‘digital infrastructure stack’ in an integrated manner:
   

   • Hard infrastructure – traditional submarine cable, satellite, broadband, mobile and Wi-Fi networks, as well as Data Centres (DCs) and cloud computing;
     

   • Physical-Digital infrastructure – devices, middleware, and networks that enable greater interaction between different digital infrastructure components and their integration with the physical world; and
     

   • Soft infrastructure – the Singapore Digital Utility Stack, comprising the foundation for key digital transactions to be conducted seamlessly and securely, upon which businesses can build innovative platforms and applications.
     

3. Playing to Singapore’s unique circumstances – while being a small dense, city-state brings with it resource limitations (e.g. carbon, land, spectrum) in digital infrastructure development, it presents opportunities to drive innovation to overcome these constraints and serve as a useful model for other urban cities. It also allows us to achieve widespread domestic connectivity more easily and bring together different ecosystem players to drive innovation and enhancements to our digital infrastructure.

Our Strategic Priorities and Moves into New Frontiers

As part of Singapore’s Digital Connectivity Blueprint launched in June 2023, MDDI has set out five strategic priorities to enhance our digital infrastructure and stay ahead of future trends and demand:

1. Provide capacity to enable submarine cable landings to double within the next 10 years;
   

2. Build seamless end-to-end 10 Gbps domestic connectivity within the next five years;
   

3. Ensure world-class resilience and security of increasingly critical compute infrastructure;
   

4. Pioneer a roadmap for the growth of new green DCs and push the sustainability envelope (Note: IMDA has since launched the Green DC Roadmap in June 2024); and
   

5. Drive greater adoption of the Singapore Digital Utility Stack, to expand the benefits of seamless digital transactions.

We will also make moves in more nascent, frontier areas to reap future opportunities.

MDDI will work with stakeholders in the public and private sectors to take these plans and ambitions forward. Ultimately, they are aimed at:

1. Enhancing opportunities for our enterprises and people;
   

2. Strengthening trust to participate in the digital economy and society confidently; and
   

3. Empowering communities to connect and improve lives.

Ensuring an Effective and Conducive Regulatory Environment

Regulatory measures are one of the levers MDDI employs to strengthen the resilience and robustness of our digital infrastructure.

We regularly review them to ensure they keep pace with technological advancements, business models, and our people’s needs. Examples of such measures include IMDA’s Code of Practice for Telecom Service Resilience and Quality of Service standards.

As outlined in the Digital Connectivity Blueprint, we will also explore the need to regulate critical components of the expanding digital infrastructure stack in a calibrated, risk-based manner.