Slow. Expensive. Unreliable. Three words that many Filipinos use to define the state of the Internet in the Philippines. And no, I’m not exaggerating. According to Net Index by Ookla, the Philippines has the slowest Internet speed in the entire Southeast Asian region. The country also lags behind in terms of broadband speed in the entire world—just around 30 places shy of the last place in 190 countries. http://vulcanpost.com/39881/2-ways-boost-broadband-internet-speed-philippines/
Pretty hard to 'jumper' broadband in the Phils Dom, you can 'jumper' the electric and get away with it but not the broadband You can boost internet speed in the Phils by being rich and subscribing to Sky (their Sky not our Sky) then you will get slightly better speed s but not by much and it will cost a fortune. Basically PLDT is a big fat lazy business that does not need to try, they have done very little very slowly to improve the feeds into and out of the country. PLDT is the closest equivalent to BT in the UK and should be responsible for the countries Internet backbone and I believe they have done a bit to introduce new subsea cables recently but as you can see from this resource http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ all the effort is concentrated in Luzon, the south is very poorly served by the looks of it.
We have cable internet via CATV and I think its about 4mb. I struggle to video skype my family in the uk. Its crap basically and we stay in what is supposed to be a developed area. Oh yes I pay about £30 / month for the tv and net
Nice webpage that. I used to lay submarine cables when I worked for C&W (later global marine systems) and then International telecom group, so I've laid and repaired a number of those on the map. it was a huge market in the late 90's with new generation cables coming onto the market for the expected communications traffic. Generally we'd lay one cable capable of dealing with 1000's of data streams. When that was laid normally after a period of time a second cable would be laid to allow redundency. Back then expected revenue from a trans atlantic cable was in the region of $1million / day i was told. To be honest I don't think it has a lot to do with the number of feeds into the country, there apears to be plenty into the phils, its how its worked in country. Also not helped by the bubble bursting around 2001, cable laying dropped off v quickly
Yeah I really like that site There are a lot of cables into the country but they have been very susceptible to single breaks like the Taiwan cable problem a number of years back, I think it was that one in 2006 that cut the country off from access from the UK for about 5 weeks as everything that was left was routing through America. It does imply that there are no other local cables down through the Islands (apart from the triangle shown), I suspect that most of the internal traffic in the country is going via Microwave relay on the Telecoms network.
Surprises me that there is not more commercial pressure for improving internet speeds there in the Philippines as it must have a derogatory effect on commerce as well as in the home. I'm sure it would be financially viable to get all the required infrastructure in place.
I did repair the taiwan cable actually back in 2001 I think it was. The seabed is constantly moving there and the cables get buried by landslides. At that water depth we use "lightwieght protected" cable as its called and its pretty thin with a relativley low breaking strain. Its a pain to try to repair as you have to hook it and bring it to the surface, but it keeps breaking because its buried and it snaps. Plus the terrain underwater has changed from the survey charts because of the landslips so the grappling runs take ages to hook the cable in the first place.
In the UK the Government realised, some time ago, that broadband Internet was a necessity. And that was long after South Korea and places like Hong Kong had wired up. If K and I can get Skype or Facetalk to work for more than a few minutes each month we are doing well....
