The state of the nation’s Internet

“In March 1521, Magellan ‘discovered’ the Philippines. Four hundred seventy-three years later, on March 29, 1994, the Philippines ‘discovered’ the world.”

Advertisement

-Dr. Rodolfo Villarica, one of the fathers of Philippine Internet

Back from a business trip abroad, Benjie Tan made his way to leased-line provider PLDT’s office in Makati City on the night of March 28, 1994.

Now Globe Telecom’s business head for research and development, technology, and design, Benjie was then an engineer at the company that supplied the routers used by the group responsible for Philnet. Philnet is a project that aimed to establish a Philippine-wide area computer network at the time.

That night, he was tasked to turn on the switch of the router that would connect the Philnet network to U.S. Internet service provider Sprint Communications, as everyone in the project’s technical committee was in Cebu City for the First International Email Conference.

During the process of configuration, Sprint let Benjie view the Internet traffic. 

“Now that the router was joining the rest of the world… just imagine that you’re at the gates of a huge auditorium, and from where you are, you can see the sea of people coming in,” Benjie said when I interviewed him for Yahoo Philippines. “Well, that was how it was for me. I was there by the door, watching for the first time Internet traffic coming in live.”

It was already 1:15 a.m. on March 29 at the time. History had been made.

The Cebu connection

At 5:30 a.m. on March 29, 1994, Benjie Tan informed Philnet’s project manager Dr. Rodolfo “Rudy” Villarica that the connection was live in Manila.

Dr. Villarica couldn’t have been any happier. He had promised his friend Dr. John Brule, organizer of the email conference at the University of San Carlos in Cebu that a live connection would coincide with the March 27-29 event. 

In front of a crowd that mostly came from the local networking community, the Philnet technical team members—composed of computer buffs working at the DOST and representatives from the Ateneo de Manila University (Ritchie Lozada and Arnie del Rosario), De La Salle University (Kelsey Hartigan-Go), University of the Philippines Diliman (Rodel Atanacio and Rommel Feria), and University of the Philippines Los Baños—finally established a connection through PLDT’s link.

Dr. Brule announced, “We’re in,” much to the delight of the audience.

“It was a great feeling for me. The Internet has equalized access to the world for the rich and the poor,” Dr. Villarica said. “Of course, it was only a footpath—an incredibly small 64kbps, which cost $11,000 per month. We can now access the Internet at 100Mbps for a few dollars.”

Fast-forward to 2014

According to the latest report of Internet broadband-testing company Ookla, the Philippines ranks 158^th out of 190 countries with regard to Internet speed.

ASEAN DNA seems to support that, with its own study putting the Philippines at the bottom pit among all Southeast Asian countries. While the highest measured speed in the region is 61Mbps and the average global and ASEAN Internet speeds are 17.5Mbps and 12.4Mbps, respectively, our country only managed a “measly” 3.6Mbps.

Twenty years after the Philippines was first connected to the world, the Internet here “is still a puzzle waiting to be assembled,” Dr. William “Bill” Torres said at a forum co-presented by CyberPress [Information and Communications Technology Journalists’ Association of the Philippines] and LG Electronics Philippines.

Along with Dr. Rudy Villarica, Dr. Torres is also credited as one of the fathers of Philippine Internet. He was involved in the initial informal negotiations with the United States National Science Foundation to bring the Internet to the country. He also founded Mozcom, the Philippines’ first commercial ISP, with Dr. Willy Gan.

“The biggest challenge for the Philippines is to pay attention to its infrastructure components and to make them work together,” Dr. Torres explained. “ICT infrastructure can help defray the cost of Internet connectivity by efficiently distributing access across the population.”

He added: “We already have three players in the local ICT market: telecommunications companies, gadget providers, and consumers. What we need is a Department of Information and Communications Technology to bring everything together.”

That’s not going to happen—not in President Benigno Aquino’s term, anyway. The administration dissolved the Commission on Information and Communications Technology on June 23, 2011, just two days after it appointed Oliver Chato as CICT Commissioner.

What was once the CICT became an Information and Communications Technology Office, now merely under the DOST.

Some wins

There are still things that are worth celebrating despite the work that needs to be done in the Internet landscape, the government seems to say.

At the same CyberPress-LG event celebrating the 20^th anniversary of Philippine Internet, DOST-ICTO Deputy Executive Director Monchito Ibrahim shared that because of the Internet, the country’s talented workforce and other competitive advantages have shone through.

“We are among the leaders in the area of voice and other IT-BPM [business-process management] services such as software development, health information management, animation, and game development,” he said.

“Unknown to many, we are a significant player in what we call ‘high-tech knowledge outsourcing,’ with activities in hardware and firmware design for many things we think are designed abroad,” according to Ibrahim.  

He divulged that IT-BPM is on its way to overtaking OFW remittances as the top contributor to the Philippines’ gross domestic product. The government is excited about this as the development means that Filipinos won’t have to go abroad and be away from their families just so they can have relatively high-paying jobs in the country.

Government’s efforts

The Department of Education’s 2013 figures reveal that only 20 percent of public elementary schools are located in areas with Internet access, and a mere 10 percent of them have an Internet connection. To stop the widening of the digital divide, the DOST-ICTO has launched the TV White Space or TVWS program.

TVWS technology uses the vacant, wasted frequencies located between broadcast TV channels to provide Internet connectivity. This way, those beyond the reach of commercial wired or wireless broadband service can still have access to data.

DOST-ICTO says TVWS is considered an ideal wireless data delivery medium for the Philippines because of the country’s long-distance propagation features and the ability of its signals to travel over water and through thick foliage.

The program is currently being pilot-tested in Bohol and Leyte.

Vision 20/20

Admittedly, there are still a lot of things that need improvement. However, we can’t deny that the Philippines has come a long way from the 64kbps serial link the country initially had 20 years ago. Two decades have passed. What will the next 20 years be like?

Imagine the possibilities.