IX SIG election nominee - Ong Wee Cheong

Statement

Ong Wee Cheong is currently the Deputy Director from SingTel (Singapore Telecommunications Limited). He has over 20 years of experience in the information technology and Internet industry as well as telecommunications business. He is a pioneer of the Internet team in Singapore who established and commercialized Internet business and Internet Exchange model in 1994, the largest regional Internet Backbone in Asia Pacific.

Mr Ong is very familiar in both submarine cable and satellite systems infrastructure besides the area of internet infrastructure in Asia. Today, SingTel has established itself as one of the leading Asian carriers who has successfully built up the Asian Internet Backbone via both submarine cable and satellite systems. He has spent over 8 years in developing countries especially in South Asia region during the early stage of Internet era and assisted most of the ISPs in building up the cost effective network such as Asymmetric and hybrid IP network solutions and connectivity to the SingTel Internet Backbone. He is a familiar name in the industry.

He has spent many years in establishing POPs and peers with the tier-1 network service providers across the regions and continents breakthrough the US centric model. He has also initiated the first few DS-3 bandwidth via satellite systems to reinforce the network backup connectivity in Asia.

Mr Ong is also the pioneer who initiated the Internet roaming globally after he has successfully rolled out the Internet service to both consumer and corporate business groups. Besides having developed and implemented value-added solutions to meet the industry demand, he also started the business class IP network in early day which today is known as secured MPLS network. He has also implemented the carrier hotel which benefited most of the new operators and this has evolved to what is known as co-location service benefiting content service providers to bring their contents nearer to Asia without wasting the valuable bandwidth across the continents. Mr Ong has in the early days realized the value and importance of bandwidth direct to users and hence was among the first few providers in Asia to introduce the broadband in the sky network and today has benefited the marine industry with broadband in the seas.

He is also one of the pioneer members of Singapore Computer Society working in IT industry prior to joining SingTel.