Our “not good” internet speed

It took Chinese tech magnate Jack Ma’s visit to the Philippines to bring back to our attention the sluggish internet speed in our country. Such a fact has become a commonly accepted way of life in our country that anything faster than 4Mbps and is reliable has become the exception rather than the norm.

During a lecture at the De La Salle University last week, Ma made a comment that when he arrived late night in Manila he tried to test the speed of the internet and “it’s not good.” This comment drew cheers from his audience, according to a report by The Philippine STAR. The best thing was that executives of the country’s telecoms giants PLDT and Globe Telecom were present during the lecture. Government officials should have been there too.

Ma’s anecdotal remarks has basis in fact. In the same report, The Philippine STAR wrote that cloud service provider and content delivery network Akamai Intelligent Platform reported that the Philippines has the slowest and most intermittent internet connection speed in the world.

Coming after Information and Communications Secretary Rodolfo Salalima’s resignation last September, President Rodrigo Duterte announced that he wanted to open the telecommunications industry in the Philippines to competitors from other countries like China. Duterte complained that Salalima did not act on the applications of foreign competitors though all the while promising a national broadband plan.

While a national broadband plan promises a faster and more accessible internet in two to three years, such period is still a long wait and a very costly one in economic terms. In the 21st-century knowledge economy, consider how many productive hours and business opportunities are lost in a day to a sluggish internet connection.

For instance, it is said that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost the online shopping company Amazon.com $1.6 billion in sales each year. Experts working with the European Commission had long time ago estimated that companies using broadband-based processes improve their employees’ productivity by five percent in the manufacturing sector and by 10 percent in the services sector.

Given that, what’s keeping the Philippines from pursuing a decent internet speed soon enough to stem the waste of productive hours and opportunity caused by an inept telecoms sector?

One can easily cite corruption as the major cause. Remember the national broadband network project during the Arroyo administration over a decade ago? The deal was scuttled allegedly because too many dirty fingers tried to dip into the pie.

But, for me, the real cause is really the lack of foresight among our government and business leaders. This lack of foresight ultimately led us to where we are now. For one, government regulations are not in step with the need for more cellular network infrastructure. On the part of the telecom companies, they are afflicted with a bottomline myopia that only looks at the bottom-line profit of maintaining a duopoly and overlooks the market integrity necessary to build a mature and flourishing economy.

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The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board still does not get it. Now, it has ordered Grab and Uber to put LTFRB stickers on their cars and the drivers to always wear their IDs in full view of the passenger.

This is a case of regulators, clueless on the essence of TNVS, dipping their hands too much into a matter the greater public has not asked them to intervene.

In the first place, Grab and Uber do not own the cars that use their ride-sharing platform. For another, why require an ID when the platform that runs TNVS already contains all the safeguards as regards the identity of the driver and his or her passenger rating?

What the sticker and IDs do is further defeat the crux of TNVS which is ride sharing. I, for example, usually drive alone to and from work which means four extra seats unoccupied in my car. Sayang, di ba? A waste of space on the road.

The TNVS platform allows me to share a ride with other commuters along my route, with some added benefit of shared cost of the ride. But who would want to share a ride when you are up to your neck in regulations from a pre-information technology era? Di na lang ko.