Good times for consumers ahead as MyRepublic rattles the incumbents

THIS week in telecommunications may have proven a recently much-discussed stereotype: that startups are outspoken, eager disrupters of the establishment - and incumbents careful, sophisticated veterans ever wary of upstarts.

When fourth telco hopeful MyRepublic confounded the market on Wednesday by unveiling its proposed mobile plans - one as low as a third the price of the incumbents' - even before it has won the fourth telco licence, the Big Three telcos responded (hours later) in classic painstaking fashion.

M1 said it was "far too premature to comment at this point", Singtel said "no comment", and StarHub literally did not comment.

(In fact, Singtel somewhat sprang a countermove, announcing after the market closed on Wednesday a new feature DataX2, that offers customers double their mobile data allowance for only S$5.90 more a month, as part of efforts to expand its data-centric plans. It's imaginably a direct challenge to MyRepublic's proposed mobile plans…