Summary

  • Singapore Internet Exchange Limited publishes a port price table whose first row reads "1 x 1 | 70" and whose last reads "5 x 400 | 20,000" — 70 Singapore dollars a month for a gigabit port against 20,000 for two terabits of port capacity, a sevenfold difference per gigabit once you divide.
  • The same operator's peering page states that port sizes available are 1G, 10G and 100G, and that a member may request up to two IP addresses per ASN only when connecting from two different locations with both ports at 10G and above. The two sentences sit on one site, describe one product, and disagree about what it is.

Anyone buying interconnection in Singapore eventually lands on the same two pages, and they read as if they were written by different companies at different times. One is a price list with a 400-gigabit tier. The other is a service description that has never heard of 400-gigabit ports and treats 100G as the ceiling.

This is not a scandal. It is something more useful: the first place where Singapore Internet Exchange Limited, which trades as SGIX, publishes numbers that can be checked against each other. For years the exchange's public surface has been slogans and graphs — a claim to be Singapore's largest not-for-profit internet exchange, a claim to points of presence in all major data centres, a set of traffic charts with a disclaimer attached. The price table and the address rule are different in kind. They are countable.

And counted, they describe a fabric that is more specific, more limited and more interesting than the marketing sentence admits.

One page sells a port the other page does not offer

The peering page is where a prospective member is supposed to learn what to ask for. Its retained text says: "Members can connect to SGIX using one or more physical connections and reach many other peers on the peering fabric, thus optimizing the cost per peer when exchanging traffic between different networks. Port size available are 1G, 10G and 100G for traffic exchange."

That is the entire speed range offered on the page. Three tiers. The largest is 100G.

The port price page is where a member learns what to pay. Its retained rows begin "1 x 1 | 70 | 1x 1G-LX over SMF" and run, through rows not captured in the retained excerpt, to "5 x 400 | 20,000 | 5x 400G-LR4 over SMF". The unit is Singapore dollars per month. The page states that port prices exclude cross-connect fees and GST. And it attaches a footnote to the 400-gigabit configuration: N x 400GE ports are available at Global Switch (Tai Seng) and Equinix SG1 and SG3.

So the price list contains a product tier — 400-gigabit ports, sold five at a time — that the service description does not mention at all. A member reading only the peering page would conclude the exchange tops out four times below what it actually invoices.

There are innocent explanations. The peering page may describe the standard traffic-exchange product while the price page covers a premium tier sold to a different class of buyer. The 400G row may have been added after the peering page was last edited, or the peering page may list speeds only for the ordinary peering LAN while 400G ports are quoted on request. None of that is stated on either page. What is stated is contradictory, and both statements are the operator's own.

For a buyer sizing a decision, the contradiction has a price. The difference between a 100G ceiling and a 400G ceiling is not cosmetic: it governs whether a member with a full rack of routers in Tai Seng can collapse four 100G links into one 400G port and one cross-connect, or must keep buying ports and cross-connects in fours. Cross-connects are excluded from the quoted price on both readings, so the buyer cannot compute the real difference from these pages. That is the gap that matters, and it is not the gap the marketing prose discusses.

The arithmetic the page never does

Two rows are enough to compute something the exchange does not compute for you.

A single 1G port costs 70 SGD a month. That is 70 SGD per gigabit of port capacity per month.

Five 400G ports cost 20,000 SGD a month. That is 2,000 gigabits of port capacity for 20,000 SGD, or 10 SGD per gigabit per month.

The large configuration is seven times cheaper per gigabit than the small one. Both numbers come from the same table, on the same retrieval date, in the same currency. The ratio is not a discount the exchange advertises; it is a consequence of its own rows.

What the ratio tells you is who the price list is for. At 70 SGD a month, a 1G port costs less than a business broadband line and attracts exactly the constituency a not-for-profit exchange claims to serve: small networks, research outfits, regional operators buying a foothold in Singapore. At 10 SGD per gigabit-month, the 400G configuration is priced for a customer whose problem is not access but density — someone terminating a large volume of traffic in one building and optimising cost per gigabit rather than cost per port.

Those are two different businesses sharing one price list. The peering page describes the first. The price page, at its top end, describes the second. Neither page mentions the other's customer.

A caveat that belongs beside these numbers rather than at the end of the article: the retained excerpt captures the first and last rows of the table, not the middle ones. The intermediate tiers — presumably 10G, 100G and the two-port and four-port configurations — are not in the retained text, so the curve between 70 and 10 SGD per gigabit-month cannot be reconstructed from what is verifiably in hand. The two endpoints are exact; the shape between them is unmeasured.

The rule that counts locations, and stops at two

The most valuable sentence on the peering page is not about speed.

"Subject to resource availability and operations approval," it reads, "members may request for up to 2 IP addresses per ASN if connecting from 2 different locations and with both ports at 10G and above."

Unpack it and you have the exchange's own definition of a multi-site member. One address per ASN is the default. A second address requires a second location. Both locations must run ports of at least 10G. And the permission extends to two locations, not three, not "all major data centres" — two.

That is the only place in SGIX's retained public text where "location" functions as a countable unit with a number attached. The front page, which claims points of presence "strategically located in all major data centres across Singapore", attaches no number at all. The peering page attaches one, and the number is two.

The address rule is a routing rule, not a facilities census, and the distinction needs stating precisely: a cap of two addressable locations for a single ASN says nothing about how many buildings the exchange has equipment in. Members can connect from more than two sites; they simply cannot hold more than two IP addresses per ASN for the privilege. What it does establish is that the fabric is genuinely multi-site in the operator's own operational model, and that the operator found two the right number to administer. Both facts matter, and neither is on the home page.

There is a second reading worth putting beside the first. A 10G floor on both ports means the multi-site entitlement is not available to the exchange's cheapest customers. Buy two 1G ports in two buildings at 70 SGD each and you do not qualify for the second address. To be treated as a two-site network by SGIX, the smallest configuration that works is two 10G ports — an order of magnitude above the entry price. The 1G tier exists, but the multi-site architecture is not sold into it.

Three buildings and a claim about all of them

The front page's footprint claim is expansive: a distributed peering network with points of presence in all major data centres across Singapore, coverage that "allows service providers and enterprises to connect seamlessly from any location, islandwide".

The price page names three buildings: Global Switch in Tai Seng, Equinix SG1 and Equinix SG3. Those are the sites where the 400-gigabit configuration is available. SG1 and SG3 are adjacent halls on the same Equinix Singapore campus; Tai Seng is a separate building across the island. So the named 400G footprint is two physical districts, one of which is a single operator's estate.

That is a narrower thing than "all major data centres". It may be entirely consistent with it: an exchange can have presence in twenty buildings and offer its highest-density ports in three. The two statements are not in contradiction. But only one of them is checkable, and it is the one on the price page. The claim about all major data centres remains, in the retained record, a sentence without a list. No page in the material examined on 8 November 2026 enumerates the buildings, the number of sites, or the members reachable at each.

One page that would ordinarily settle it could not be read. The peering participants page returned no accessible content on that date; the retrieval recorded that the participant list could not be obtained. That is a limitation of this examination, not evidence that the list is empty, suppressed or unmaintained. SGIX may publish a full participant roster that simply did not load. What can be said is narrower and still useful: on 8 November 2026, the public record available for scrutiny contained no participant count, so any statement that the exchange has a particular number of members is unsupported by retained text, including statements of its own size.

What the traffic page measures, and what it declines to

The traffic statistics page publishes graphs — daily, weekly, monthly, yearly — and a notice that sits above them: "Please Note: Traffic statistic irregularities are often the result of internal processing errors and should not be interpreted as evidence of a service disruption."

That sentence is doing honest work. It warns a reader not to read a dip as an outage. It is also the closest thing to a method statement on the page. The retained text carries no peak figure, no percentile, no sampling interval, no statement of whether the graphs measure ingress, egress, or the greater of the two, and no statement of whether they count only the peering LAN or the 400G ports as well.

The disclaimer therefore cuts both ways, and readers should notice which way it cuts in each case. For an operator monitoring its own dashboards, it removes a false alarm. For anyone trying to establish the size of Singapore's domestic interconnection market, it removes the only quantitative artefact the exchange publishes, while leaving the graphs on display. A number that cannot be read off the page in text, with no stated method, cannot be compared over time or against another exchange's published statistics. It can only be looked at.

What remains measurable, then, is not traffic. It is price per gigabit, port tiers, the address rule, and the count of named buildings. That is a thinner set than an exchange's marketing implies and a much more solid set than its critics usually acknowledge.

The registry row, and why it is not the story

Singapore Internet Exchange Limited holds registry identifiers that are checkable. The APNIC query record shows the organisation handle ORG-SIEL1-AP. APNIC's membership structure page describes how membership tiers correspond to the IP address resources an organisation holds.

That is a statement about address holdings. It is not a statement about ports, buildings, members or traffic, and it should not be used as one. An organisation can hold a modest block of addresses and operate a busy exchange, or hold a large block and operate nothing at all. The registry tells you the entity exists and pays for a resource class. The price page tells you what it sells. Only the second is a fact about interconnection, and it is the one worth arguing over.

The capacity question that sits behind all of it

Why does any of this matter beyond a documentation inconsistency?

Because Singapore's data-centre capacity has been administratively constrained, and every claim about domestic peering economics rests on that constraint whether or not the person making it has read the instrument. The regulator's IMDA portal is where that policy lives. Reporting on the allocation side has been concrete: on 22 August 2026, The Star reported that Singapore allocated 200MW of new data-centre capacity to four operators.

Two hundred megawatts to four operators is a specific, countable allocation — and the report does not name all four, nor does it state which buildings receive the power or when. The link from that number to a port price in Tai Seng is not documented anywhere in the retained material. It is an inference, and a weak one if pressed: capacity allocated at the wholesale power layer reaches an exchange through building owners, tenant fit-outs and cross-connect provisioning, a chain with several years of latency and several unobserved steps.

What can be said without inference is narrower. The three buildings where SGIX sells its densest ports are all wholesale data-centre sites owned by third parties, not SGIX properties. SGIX's 400G product therefore inherits whatever power, space and cross-connect terms those landlords offer. If the building is constrained, the exchange's top tier is constrained with it, and the price list's 10 SGD per gigabit-month is a price for capacity that exists only where a landlord provides it.

What would settle it

Four disclosures would move this from inconsistency to architecture.

A building list with the port speeds available at each would replace the claim about "all major data centres" with something a member can act on, and would show whether the 400G footprint is an exception or the pattern.

A reconciliation of the peering page and the price page — one sentence saying whether 400G is a peering port, a private-interconnect port, or something else — would resolve the speed contradiction without requiring anyone to guess which page is stale.

The middle rows of the price table would turn two endpoints into a curve, letting a buyer see where the per-gigabit price falls and whether the step from 100G to 400G is continuous or a cliff.

And a stated method for the traffic graphs — interval, direction, scope — would make the only quantitative publication on the site comparable across time. None of these requires publishing anything commercially sensitive. Three of the four are edits to pages that already exist.

Until then, the honest description of SGIX is this: an exchange in two Equinix halls and one Tai Seng building selling 400-gigabit ports at 10 SGD per gigabit-month and gigabit ports at 70, governed by an address rule that recognises exactly two locations and requires 10G at both, publishing charts it explicitly says not to trust for anomalies, and naming no member, no site count and no traffic figure anywhere in the record examined. That is not a small exchange, and it is not a large one. It is an unmeasured one with a price list — which is more than most of its peers offer, and less than its own front page promises.