Standards Revised Downward to Align With Operational Reality; Operational Reality Continues Unchanged

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

NTC Reclassifies Philippine Internet Speed Standards to Finally Reflect What Filipinos Have Always Had

MANILA — The National Telecommunications Commission announced this week that it has revised the Philippines’ minimum broadband speed standards, lowering the benchmark for what constitutes “broadband” internet service from 25 megabits per second to a figure that more accurately reflects the actual average download speeds experienced by Philippine consumers in their homes and offices, which the NTC’s announcement describes as “aligning standards with operational reality” and which the tech community is describing as “lowering the bar to meet the bar.”

The revision, fourteen years in the making according to the NTC’s own documentation, addresses a longstanding discrepancy between the international standard definition of broadband and the speeds actually provided to Philippine consumers by their internet service providers, a gap that has persisted through multiple NTC administrations, multiple legislative inquiries, and multiple consumer complaints, and has now been resolved by the mechanism of adjusting the standard rather than the service.

The Old Standard, the New Standard, and What You Are Actually Getting

The previous benchmark defined broadband as connections of 25 Mbps or faster. Global broadband averages in developed markets typically run between 100 and 300 Mbps. The actual average fixed broadband speed in the Philippines, per industry data, runs somewhere between 50 and 80 Mbps in the best metro areas and substantially lower in provincial markets, with significant variation based on time of day, weather conditions, building materials, the distance between the subscriber and the nearest node, and what the neighbors are doing. The new standard sets the minimum threshold at a level the NTC describes as “achievable and realistic,” which are words that tell you a great deal about the previous standard’s relationship to achievement and reality.

PLDT and Globe, the dominant providers, released statements welcoming the revision as “a more accurate framework for assessing network performance.” This is the telecommunications industry equivalent of a restaurant welcoming a health inspector’s decision to reclassify “warm” as the minimum temperature for serving food that was previously required to be “hot.” The food has not changed. The definition has. Customer satisfaction data has not been updated to reflect the new framework.

The International Context

The International Telecommunication Union tracks global broadband development and has noted the Philippines’ internet infrastructure as an ongoing development challenge. The country ranks in the middle tier globally for connectivity, above the lowest performers and below the markets it is typically benchmarked against for economic competition. The NTC’s revision will technically improve the Philippines’ measured compliance with its own broadband standards. Whether it will improve the Philippines’ connectivity ranking relative to other countries depends on a question the NTC’s press release does not address: what those countries are doing with their standards in the same period.

The Department of Information and Communications Technology has a national connectivity plan with ambitious targets for 2028. Those targets are measured against the original standards. What happens to the targets when the standards change is a question currently under review. The review is being conducted via email. The email is loading.

Consumer Response

Consumer response has been swift, specific, and almost entirely expressed through the same internet connections being reclassified. Social media commentary has focused on the logical structure of the revision — that the government has responded to slow internet by redefining slow internet as not-slow internet — which Filipinos have found particularly fertile satirical territory. One widely shared post read: “Finally, my connection is broadband. Nothing has changed but I feel differently about it.” It received 18,000 reactions. The post loaded in 4.3 seconds, which is now within standard.

Mother’s Day Video Call Quality

Today is Mother’s Day. Across the Philippines, families are attempting to video call relatives abroad and relatives are attempting to video call home. The calls are pixelating in the way that Philippine video calls have always pixelated. The audio is cutting out in the way that Philippine audio has always cut out. Mothers are saying “can you hear me” and children are saying “you froze again” and the connection is doing what the connection does. Under the new NTC standards, all of this is happening at broadband speed. Happy Mother’s Day, Philippines. The call quality is officially fine. The mothers can still barely see you. This is unchanged and also beloved.

More satire: https://newsthump.com

More at ManilaNews.PH.

What Broadband Actually Requires

Building out high-quality broadband infrastructure requires capital investment, right-of-way access for fiber laying, spectrum allocation for wireless networks, and regulatory frameworks that incentivize coverage of underserved areas rather than only profitable urban markets. The Philippines has a National Broadband Plan that addresses all of these in principle. Implementation has been constrained by the costs of last-mile connectivity in a geographically fragmented archipelago of over 7,600 islands, competing priorities for right-of-way access, and a regulatory environment in which PLDT and Globe hold dominant positions that have historically not been subject to the kind of competitive pressure that drives infrastructure investment. The NTC’s revised standards do not address any of these structural factors. They address the measurement framework. A measurement framework that reports acceptable speeds on a network that delivers unacceptable speeds is a document improvement rather than an infrastructure improvement. These are different things. The commission has produced the former. The country needs the latter. The difference loads slowly either way.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/