PHMitsuki Yow
Honorary Poster
THE POST-SALALIMA DICT PLAN FOR FIXING OUR INTERNET
By Eliseo Rio Jr (OIC of DICT)
The reason why we have such a small number of cellsites towers (Vietnam has 70,000 towers compared to our 20,000) is that we need 25 government permits to construct one cell tower.
But also for more than a decade since 2002, the killer application in our mobile network was TEXTING, where we became the texting capital of the world. With nearly a billion SMS sent and received a day, the telcos were getting most of their revenues from this single service. AND THE 20,000 TOWERS ARE MORE THAN ENOUGH TO HANDLE THE SMS TRAFFIC. So there was no real incentive to install more towers. But when the smart phones and tablets become popular and texting is being replaced by Facebook, Twitter and Viber, suddenly the number of cell sites became inadequate. In other countries, voice instead of SMS was the more prevalent source of revenue and it require much much more towers to handle the voice traffic than SMS, making them more adaptive in quickly adjusting to internet content. Now we have a lot of catching up to do, as it turned out that short messaging system (sms) was a short-lived bonanza.
“While the general perception of the public is that Internet access here in the Philippine is slow and expensive, we could not be the world number 1 BPO voice service provider if really our internet speed is slow and its cost is expensive. Our problem is that most of us access the Internet on the mobile data infrastructure of telcos and because we lack cell towers, congestion in connectivity would likely happen. We have only around 20,000 towers at present when we need at least 67,000 towers to improve our mobile data access.
The following are DICT's planned solutions:
1. With the Free Internet Access in Public Places Act (RA 10929), the government will put up tens of thousands of Wifi Access Points (APs) in public places to help decongest cellsites. When hundreds of APs were installed along the MRT3 tracks in EDSA giving free WiFi to the public, an average of 700,000 people daily accessed these which greatly decongested the cellsites covering EDSA.
2. The government will construct common towers to be leased to telcos, which when added to the telco towers built or to be built will attain the needed 67K at the earliest possible time.
3. An EO is awaiting signature of the President to lessen the LGUs and NGAs permits to built towers and limit approval/disapproval to 7 calendar days. If not acted upon within 7 days, the application is deemed approved. If denied, an explanation why must be submitted to the Office of the President within the same period.
4. Government to encourage applications and content that will make people subscribe to high speed internet to their homes, such as being able to work and study at homes. The savings in time and money from not suffering the traffic in Metro Manila even for once or twice a week, would be more than enough to pay for the subscription to high-speed internet. We will soon have a Telecommuting Law to address this.”
By Eliseo Rio Jr (OIC of DICT)
The reason why we have such a small number of cellsites towers (Vietnam has 70,000 towers compared to our 20,000) is that we need 25 government permits to construct one cell tower.
But also for more than a decade since 2002, the killer application in our mobile network was TEXTING, where we became the texting capital of the world. With nearly a billion SMS sent and received a day, the telcos were getting most of their revenues from this single service. AND THE 20,000 TOWERS ARE MORE THAN ENOUGH TO HANDLE THE SMS TRAFFIC. So there was no real incentive to install more towers. But when the smart phones and tablets become popular and texting is being replaced by Facebook, Twitter and Viber, suddenly the number of cell sites became inadequate. In other countries, voice instead of SMS was the more prevalent source of revenue and it require much much more towers to handle the voice traffic than SMS, making them more adaptive in quickly adjusting to internet content. Now we have a lot of catching up to do, as it turned out that short messaging system (sms) was a short-lived bonanza.
“While the general perception of the public is that Internet access here in the Philippine is slow and expensive, we could not be the world number 1 BPO voice service provider if really our internet speed is slow and its cost is expensive. Our problem is that most of us access the Internet on the mobile data infrastructure of telcos and because we lack cell towers, congestion in connectivity would likely happen. We have only around 20,000 towers at present when we need at least 67,000 towers to improve our mobile data access.
The following are DICT's planned solutions:
1. With the Free Internet Access in Public Places Act (RA 10929), the government will put up tens of thousands of Wifi Access Points (APs) in public places to help decongest cellsites. When hundreds of APs were installed along the MRT3 tracks in EDSA giving free WiFi to the public, an average of 700,000 people daily accessed these which greatly decongested the cellsites covering EDSA.
2. The government will construct common towers to be leased to telcos, which when added to the telco towers built or to be built will attain the needed 67K at the earliest possible time.
3. An EO is awaiting signature of the President to lessen the LGUs and NGAs permits to built towers and limit approval/disapproval to 7 calendar days. If not acted upon within 7 days, the application is deemed approved. If denied, an explanation why must be submitted to the Office of the President within the same period.
4. Government to encourage applications and content that will make people subscribe to high speed internet to their homes, such as being able to work and study at homes. The savings in time and money from not suffering the traffic in Metro Manila even for once or twice a week, would be more than enough to pay for the subscription to high-speed internet. We will soon have a Telecommuting Law to address this.”
