THIS is not an early April Fool's joke. On April 1 next year, close to one million Internet dial-up subscribtions in Singapore could 'disappear'.

It raises a poser about one set of figures Singapore has used in claiming to be among the world's most wired cities, although this claim holds, thanks to other criteria and widespread broadband penetration here.

SingTel, which owns most residential phone lines here, ends its free Web access service, available to all these customers, on April 1.

Called mysingtel, the dial-up service was launched in early 2000, before broadband really caught on.

It meant that every residential phone line could be connected to the Net, for the price of a local phone call - provided everyone signed up for mysingtel.

The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) has, in fact, been including every residential phone line in its 'dial-up Internet subscription' figures, The Straits Times understands.

It now seems that even non-users of mysingtel were counted in: Internet subscription figures reflected anyone with a residential phone line.

Hence, Singapore's dial-up base almost tripled in two months from December 1999, after mysingtel's launch. In February 2000, IDA recorded about 1.7 million dial-up subscribers islandwide, or a population penetration rate of 52 per cent.

Over the next seven years, as faster broadband subscriptions rose in popularity, the number of dial-up users started to fall.

IDA started to publish broadband subscription data on its website only in January 2003, and continued to use the dial-up subscription figures to show how wired Singapore was.

The numbers were published in IDA's annual reports that highlight key national infocomm developments. Dial-up figures were also quoted by the Ministry of Trade and Industry in its Economic Survey of Singapore 2002 and 2003 reports.

Come April 1, SingTel's 938,000 fixed-line residential customers, of whom only 7,000 are active mysingtel users, will have to be excluded from IDA's dial-up subscription figures.

Singapore's remaining home dial-up market - all paid users - has 93,000 subscribers, or a population penetration rate of 2 per cent. This figure is more in line with adoption rates in developed nations as users switch more to broadband services.

The Straits Times approached several infocomm analysts and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations agency for information and communication technologies, to get their take.

Mr Jonathan Coham, a consumer group analyst at British-based research firm Ovum, said that counting non-users 'will artificially inflate numbers'.

Mr Tim Johnson, chief analyst at British-based research and consultancy firm Point Topic, said: 'This conceals the fact that many people in Singapore may not be using the Internet.'

The ITU defines a dial-up subscriber as one who uses the service at least once every three months.

When contacted, an IDA spokesman said its numbers are based on the submissions of all dial-up Internet service operators. They do not take into account 'the level of Internet usage, platforms or the price of the subscription'.

For actual subscription figures, the IDA suggested checking with with the operators themselves.

But dial-up figures are not the only indicator. IDA also conducts annual surveys on infocomm usage.

These surveys reveal the number of households here with access to the Internet and what people use the Web for. Activities monitored include online banking, instant messaging and job applications.

itham@sph.com.sg