All government agencies and offices down to the barangays will soon have access to free ultra-speed internet access once the government finishes the Luzon Bypass Infrastructure, Department of Information and Communications Technology officer-in-charge Eliseo Rio Jr. said.
Seen as a ”game changer” in providing faster, cheaper, and more accessible Internet across the country, Rio said that the LBI will increase the government’s capacity from 2TBps (TeraBytes Per Second) to at least 12TBps, in a short period of time, at no additional cost to the government.
“DICT will use part of this bandwidth capacity for all its internet connectivity programs like the Domestic Wideband Information Network [DWIN] where all government agencies and offices down to the barangays will be connected to very fast and free internet access,” Rio said in a social media post Saturday.
“This will bring government online services like healthcare, education, trade, employment and job opportunities, social welfare, etc., to even the most remote areas of the country,” he added.
The new infrastructure, which will cost the government an initial P975 million and a P100-million yearly maintenance cost, will bypass the Luzon Strait where submarine cable breaks frequently occur because that area is prone to earthquakes and typhoons. This will also directly connect Luzon to internet hubs in the United States and Asia, once completed.
Last Wednesday, the DICT, BCDA and Facebook signed an agreement to build the government’s first landing stations under the project.
Two cable landing stations, one in Baler, Aurora and another in Poro Point, San Fernando, La Union, and a 250-kilometer fiber optic cable corridor connecting the two will be built by government-owned Bases Conversion and Development Authority, expected to be completed by around third quarter of 2019.
Social networking site Facebook will be the first user of the LBI, Rio said, allowing Facebook to bypass the Luzon Strait and remunerate the government at least 2,000,000 MBps or 2TBps international cable link capacity, 25 percent of which will go to BCDA.
The new infrastructure will also be used in compliance with RA 10929 or the “Free Internet Access in Public Places Act,” where DICT plans to install more than 250,000 Wifi Access Points nationwide in provincial and municipal capitol and parks, government schools and SUC, hospitals, bus and train stations, airports and piers, Rio added.
The Philippines has one of the slowest Internet speeds in the world, according to a mobile network research firm OpenSignal. It has an average download speed of 8.24 Mbps—or a fifth of the speed of list topnotcher Singapore, which logged 46.64 Mbps.
Aside from this, OpenSignal added LTE availability in the Philippines is at 58.83 percent, placing the country at the 69th spot out of 77 countries in its ranking.
South Korea, Japan and Norway, which performed best in this category had 4G availability of 96.69 percent, 94.11 percent, and 88.66 percent, respectively.