Based on more than 10 million unique tests crowdsourced by Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence in December 2020 alone, the Duterte administration recorded a historic average download speed improvement of 297.47% and 202.41% for fixed broadband and mobile broadband, respectively.
This after the country’s average download speed for fixed and mobile broadband jumped to 31.44Mbps and 22.50Mbps, respectively.
When Pres. Rodrigo R. Duterte took office in July 2016, the Philippine’s average download speeds for fixed and mobile broadband were only at 7.91Mbps and 7.44Mbps, and since then, he has been ordering telecommunications companies to keep improving their services.
"Kindly improve your services before December," he warned the telcos during his fifth State of the Nation Address.
Prior to the release of Ookla’s year-end report, telcos reported a 500% increase in data usage at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maintenance work and upgrade for cellular sites also proved to be difficult due to the various COVID-related restrictions imposed in the country in addition to the infrastructure devastation brought by recent typhoons.
After getting national government’s support in their call for LGUs to expedite permits related to building cellular towers, Globe lauded the Duterte administration’s implementation of the Bayanihan To Recover as One Act.
“Previously, we needed to wait and spend years to complete at least 29 permits. But with the help of the Bayanihan To Recover as One Act, LGUs are now enabled to become more open and supportive of our network roll-outs, especially in the past weeks,” said Atty. Froilan Castelo, Globe General Counsel in a statement.
Smart Communications, Inc. also announced that it will be rolling out additional 2,000 cell sites in 2021 to further improve coverage and connectivity.
Through its Chief Administrative Officer Adel Tamano, Dito revealed it has built roughly 1,900 telecommunications towers as of December 2020, in preparation for its commercial launch target set in March 2021.
Meanwhile, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) has achieved dramatic improvements in the rollout of its Free Wi-Fi for All Program (FW4A) in 2020, achieving a rate that is 500% greater than its previous average of 800 sites per year from 2016 to 2019.
“This program (Free Wi-Fi for All) is instrumental to fulfilling the marching orders given by the President to DICT, upon our assumption last July 2019, which includes connecting every Filipino to each other, to their government, and to the world. So, from day-one we immediately went into analyzing factors that may speed-up the implementation and applied the needed reforms,” DICT Sec. Gregorio B. Honasan II said.
