A PARTY-LIST lawmaker has accused telco companies of shortchanging the public and embarrassing President Rodrigo Duterte and the country for the “lousy internet service” of a veritable “duopoly.”
In a privilege speech Tuesday evening, 1Pacman Rep. Enrico Pineda echoed Duterte’s warning to the telecom duopoly to “shape up or face the consequences.”
“The lucrative telecom industry is controlled only by a duopoly which easily rakes in a net profit of P104 million a day,” Pineda told the plenary.
Pineda did not name the telecom duopoly but only two telcos corner the business— Globe Telecom Inc. and Smart Communications Inc.
Pineda also lashed at the National Telecomunications Commission for penalizing the telcos only P200 a day because that would only total P73 million and it would take 1,000 years for the duopoly feel the impact of the fine.
“Compared to the telco tycoons, I am a mere speck of dust. But this speck has a constituency to protect and a duty to fulfill,” Pineda said.
“Mr. Speaker, the Filipino people deserve better services. And they will get it, because the telcos will give it to them. I will toil. I will fight. I will not stop until this is done,” Pineda vowed.
Pineda lamented that the country’s Internet speed is 22 times slower than Japan’s, but it is 96 times more expensive.
“Not only are we being given the poorest service, we are also being forced to pay the highest rates. To say that we are being shortchanged is an understatement,” he stressed.
“The irony here is that we have reaped accolades which would have made internet speed as fast as the growth in the number of its users here. We’re the texting capital of the world, a selfie hotspot. Our Facebook subscribers dwarf the population of most countries in the world.
“We are the world’s back office, a BPO superpower. But why in the world are we lagging in terms of internet connectivity and cellular service?” he said.
Foregone opportunities range from students kept in the digital dark to businesses burdened by high broadband costs, Pineda said.
“For ordinary folks, the forfeited benefits are obvious, from dropped calls they have to pay, to cellphone loads that disappear,” he added.
Citing a report released by Internet metrics provider Ookla in 2015, Pineda said, the Philippines has the second slowest Internet download speed among 22 countries in Asia.
“We are clocking at only 3.64 Mbps, which is oceans apart from Singapore’s 122.43 Mbps; Hong Kong’s 102.96 Mbps; Japan’s 82.12 Mbps, and South Korea’s 59.77 Mbps,” Pineda said.
“Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia, supposedly our equals in the ASEAN, all outrank us. Even countries like Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, and Pakistan fare better. Only Afghanistan, a country torn by decades of war, is worse,” he said.
“This is, to say the least, downright embarrassing and totally unacceptable. While other countries are reaping the full benefits of the Information Revolution, we, Filipinos, are being held back and deprived. Imagine the costs of all the missed opportunities and economic losses that we incur every single day due to this inadequacy. They are simply incalculable,” Pineda said.
But the people’s suffering does not end there, he said.
Based on a comparative study on Internet rates made by Ookla, Pineda said, Filipino consumers are being charged P1,155 for every Mbps.
This, he said, was visibly higher than what others in the region were paying — P860 in Indonesia; P727 in Brunei; P477 in Malaysia; P445 in Cambodia, and P107 in Thailand.
In the US, he said, the charge was P158 for every one Mbps. In South Korea, it is just P20. And, most remarkably, it is only 12 pesos in Japan, Pineda said.
Pineda pinpointed to “greed” in the delayed launch of “Internet Peering (IP), where for a long time the profit motive trumped the common good that freely sharing platforms to form one connection would bring.”
“But to bring relief to our people tired of missed and dropped calls, exhausted by slow Internet, shortchanged by data capping policies, hoodwinked by deceptive ‘unli’ promos only to get fatigued by the ‘unli’ waiting time to stream movies or download files, we should begin by looking into how a government office has reneged on its duty to guard our collective interest,” he said.
For example, he said, to assuage the public’s outrage against slow Internet, the NTC, in August last year, imposed the minimum data connection speed for fixed-line services at 256 Kbps.
The problem with that benchmark, he said, is that it is 10 times less than the public expectation for a 2 Mbps standard.
“But even the 2 Mbps is a generous stepdown from global standards,” Pineda said. “The worldwide average is 10 Mbps.”
A 256 Kbps is akin to an MRT speed of four kilometers per hour, when the public expects 40 kilometers per hour, he said.
“And if telcos cannot meet the 256 Kpbs minimum broadband standard, what are the sanctions that await them?” he asked.