Two senators on Wednesday rallied behind the call of President Rodrigo Duterte to the telecommunications companies to submit their progress reports on improving their services before his imposed deadline at the end of this month.
“Together with the rest of the country, I reiterate my call for better services from our telcos,” Senator Grace Poe said.
Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon said he supports the President’s directive, having authored that provision in Bayanihan 2 suspending for three years the need for permits to construct cell towers.
“I have no written report of the number of cell towers constructed since Bayanihan 2. I only know that telco services remain bad,” Drilon said.
Poe, head of the Senate committee on public services, said Congress had done its part and “we expect improvement with the same expediency that we had in waiving their permitting requirements.”
She also supported the President’s request for a progress report from the telcos and an assessment from the National Telecommunications as primary regulator.
“Not only are we keeping watch on the telcos but we are also monitoring the performance of the NTC,” Poe said.
She says the committee’s Dec. 7 hearing will tackle the franchise renewal of DITO. She says it is also an opportunity for the NTC to show the public how it has been doing its job during the ongoing pandemic.
“It should be able to show in concrete terms how it ensured the compliance of telcos for ample bandwidth allocation and availability of service and signal to its subscribers,” Poe said.
“This pandemic has shown us unprecedented demand. Better services must be delivered in the soonest possible time.”