The Aquino administration will not meet its goal to provide at least 2 megabits per second Internet download speed to 80 percent of the households throughout the country by 2016, the National Telecommunications Commission said Tuesday.
“We will not achieve the targets under the Philippine Digital Strategy, which aims to provide an average broadband speed of at least 2 Mbps for 80 percent of households nationwide by 2016,” NTC director for regulation Edgardo Cabarios told reporters.
According to the International Telecommunication Union, only 18.90 percent of the Philippine households had Internet connection in 2012.
“We need a comprehensive approach, you can’t just let private sector to address the problem,” Cabarios said, adding the estimated P60 billion in annual investment by local telecommunication companies were not enough to achieve the broadband connection targets of the Philippines.
At the rate of P60 billion annual investment by telcos, Cabarios said it would take 10 years to meet the targets if there was no government intervention.
Cabarios said the investment requirement for at least 2Mbps for 20.17 million households by 2016 amounted to P800 billion.
The government of Thailand invested $114 million to provide Internet service as part of its economic policy. Malaysia, meanwhile, spent $4.5 billion over a period of 10 years to lay fiber optic lines to every home in Malaysia’s urban areas.
Former whistleblower and information technology expert Rodolfo Noel Lozada Jr. earlier said the government should revive a plan to build a national broadband network to improve Internet speed in the country.
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.
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.