I have changed to public IP (for flying spaghetti monster purposes), and I can tell you that changing public IP DOES NOT solve the problem. It still routes to Japan before connecting to Singapore, if you notice in Maxis forums alot of people have been complaining and it doesn't seem that Maxis is planning to fix this anytime soon.
I'm not sure VPN can solve this problem or not though. Let's see if anyone can find out.