Philippine Internet : Slow & Expensive

Internet is increasingly becoming an important commodity in our daily life. Today, we can conduct our business online, do shopping, pay our bills, read the news, and transfer and deposit money to our bank account. But while the promise of Internet is sweet, we can only frown and scream at the unreliable infrastructure of Internet in the Philippines and how many of us remain unaware of the rights we have as consumers (if we ever have any) against services that don’t meet the expected acceptable level of customer satisfaction.

According to an index of internet speed, South Korea has the fastest internet in the world. The index also takes on quality, pricing, and consumer satisfaction. All these data are available over at netindex.com.

The Philippines comes in as 133rd in a list of 169 countries with a depressing average of 1.68 Mbps. And that's seemingly an overstatement as many users here are surfing at speeds way below that average while South Korea, our Asian neighbor, takes the top position with a whopping average of 32.03 Mbps.

What lies in front of the biggest telecommunications and internet service providers in the Philippines right now is a challenge as to how they will improve their services in providing a reliable and literally fast internet connection after the country has been listed 2nd in the world with slowest web page loading according to a study conducted by Google.

The government should really step up and ease the burdens we face when it comes to internet connectivity and speed, like last year when Senator Bam Aquino has begun proceedings to instigate an investigation aimed at getting to the root cause of the slow and expensive internet service in the country.

He was spurred on to take action after reports that internet speed in the Philippines is the slowest of all ASEAN countries, coming in below the ASEAN average 12.4 Mbps download speed. A recent study commissioned by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) revealed that the country’s internet infrastructure fares poorly in comparison to its ASEAN neighbors.

The senator filed a resolution with the Committee on Trade, Commerce and Entrepreneurship, which aims to address the issue. Aquino raised important points in his proposal, notably that poor internet connection can impede business operations, which in turn has an adverse effect on trade. Slow and costly internet can also have a negative impact on the country’s opportunities to advance their telecommunications services.
Aquino resolved that the way forward is to guarantee internet users a reliable, faster and cheaper service that is readily available and easier to access. He also raised the issue of the elevated expense of internet access in the Philippines, where it costs around 1,000 PHP (16 EUR) p/m for up to 2Mbps download speed and 2,000 PHP (32 EUR) p/m for up to 5 Mbps.

He explained, “Comparing the prices of internet services among Southeast Asian countries, the cost to Filipino consumers is way more expensive than the internet costs in Singapore and Thailand, which have the fastest connections globally.”

I hope one day Philippines would advance to having a faster internet speed, because faster internet will mean better education, more efficient businesses, more attractive markets to foreign investment, better economy, and of course more informative posts from my blog.

photo from: Inquirer.net