When Cebu Gov. Hilario Davide III promised that he would raise the issue of slow Internet connection and speed to the national government, he wasn’t the only public official who did so.
The country’s slow, yet expensive access to the Internet had been raised in the halls of Congress with both senators Paolo “Bam” Aquino and Ralph Recto filing bills seeking greater access to fast, reliable Internet.
It isn’t as if the national government didn’t plan on building infrastructure that would achieve this goal. Whistle-blower Jun Lozada said the 2007 National Broadband Network (NBN) project of the former Arroyo administration would have delivered on this promise.
However, the ZTE-NBN project got mired in allegations of corruption from the start with the son of former House Speaker Jose de Venecia and former Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairman Benjamin Abalos engaging in the infamous “battle of the commissions” (Abalos allegedly told former socio-economic planning secretary Romulo Neri ‘may P200 million ka dito’ in the ZTE-NBN deal).
As most IT experts elaborated on during Senate hearings on the issue, the national government should ideally build the transmission/distribution network a.k.a. the Internet highway that would allow telecom companies like Philippine Long Distance Co. (PLDT) and Globe to connect and thus provide faster and better service to their customers.
From this digital highway, telecom firms would be required to establish an Internet Exchange that would allow routing of local traffic in the country rather than moving it outside to countries like Hong Kong.
A local traffic exchange is what allows residents and visitors to countries like Singapore which has a blistering Internet speed of 122 megabytes per second (mbps) enjoy fast, reliable connections and for its businesses to prosper owing to their greater connectivity to the World Wide Web.
Compare that to the country’s turtle like average Internet speed of 3.64 mbps which is far slower than Myanmar’s 6.54 mbps and you get an idea of how far behind we are with the rest of the world despite our claims of being the leading social media capital in the planet.
By next month, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) is said to be implementing a program that would measure Internet speed being serviced to consumers and is offering software to consumers to download to help them see for themselves how fast their Internet connection service is.
While it’s a start, sadly that’s a drop in the ocean for a boatload of problems facing the country when it comes to ensuring access to faster, reliable Internet service which was recently declared a basic human right by the United Nations (UN).
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