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Friday, March 29, 2024

National broadband pushed

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The government should revive a plan to build a national broadband network to improve Internet speed in the country, former whistleblower and information technology expert Rodolfo Noel Lozada Jr. said over the weekend.

Lozada, who became famous as the NBN-ZTE  deal whistleblower, said the best way to explain the current slow Internet speed in the country was the lack of digital highway, similar to the network of roads and highways that linked agricultural and industrial areas.

“Those roads were built primarily by government for public transport use, allowing unhampered movements of people and goods that led to the progression of the Filipino nation to what it is now,” Lozada said. 

He said with the country now in the cusp of the digital era, it needed a national broadband network to facilitate movement and trade of digital products and goods.

“This is where the heart of the current problem lies. The government has not built any major digital highway for public use. Practically all of the digital roads and highways are privately owned and imposes a ‘toll fee’ per use,” Lozada said.

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Lozada said if the government had built a national broadband network, the country could have been spared from the current slow Internet speed.

“That is similar to how government had built the public roads and highways during the agricultural and industrial era. It is a must for the government to provide for a big digital highway that allows very fast and free public transport of digital products and goods,” Lozada said.

A 2014 report by Ookla, an Internet broadband testing company, ranked the Philippines 160th out of 190 countries in terms of download speed.

The Philippines is also one of the most expensive among 64 countries with median monthly cost per Mbps at $26.60.

Lozada said with an NBN in place, private service providers would be limited to providing on a pay per use arrangement the last mile connection to end users and the local loop connection to the NBN.

This design will provides a very fast and low-cost Internet service to the entire nation, to both cities and rural barangays, he said.

It will also effectively negate the Third World quality of Internet the country is experiencing right now, he said.

The National Telecommunications Commission, in a Senate hearing tackling the current Internet speed on Aug. 18, cited the need for Internet service providers to guarantee speed of no less than 256 kilobits per second.

The NTC expects to promulgate the new rules on mobile broadband speed initially covering only fixed-line services in November.

The regulator on Aug. 13 issued Memorandum Circular No. 07-08-2015, stating that “broadband” must have data connection speed of at least 256 kilobits per second – the standard of the International Telecommunications Union.

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