The Philippine Online Chronicles

I remember when I had this huge international conference last November 2009 in Cavite: I readied myself for a lot of geeky fun and ninja skills acquisition.

The first night we were there (I had my eyes wide open and being the usual talkative me, came equipped with an unstoppable mouth), because we were in a tech-isolated place, the first thing we did was to access our work e-mails to remind our bosses why we were in Cavite for a week.

There were almost a hundred of us in the huge auditorium expecting our e-mails to arrive in our mobile phones or in our laptops. Two hours later, all 100 of us gave up. It was a very shameful day for the Philippines – our country, for the first time, hosted this Asia-wide conference on opensource software, and all lectures ended up being based on what the Ubuntu CD could give. Somehow the lack of Internet connection helped build a community among all the participants, but every time I recall each of my foreigner friends buying a USB mobile broadband modem (which in my opinion isn't very reliable) in hopes of checking their Facebook accounts and letting their colleagues know their statuses inside the conference, it makes me want to kick a Telco and remind them that the conference sponsors spent thousands of dollars for a year's subscription to their high-speed broadband, good for only seven days, just to end up with no connection and 200 plus participants sharing a near-dialup-speed connection for the next three excruciating days.

But wait, rather than going into the “rant blog” format, let's look at the facts.

Pinoy net connectivity 101

Back in college, our wonderful networking professor pointed out how the Internet behaves. As opposed to international or local calls, Internet communication doesn't depend on “reserved lines.” Phone calls have reserved resources, ensuring the quality of voice to be kept as high as possible. Internet communication, on the other hand depends on “routers.” You might already have one in your local network. Just look for a seemingly-useless device that has a lot of blinking LEDs, and most importantly, is directly connected to the so-called “Internet connector” (or LAN cable connected to your fave ISP).

Back to my beautiful professor. She pointed out to us that the Philippines has two Internet backbones – the “biggest Internet fat pipes” we have so far. The first one is from PLDT (surprise, surprise), and the other one is from Mozcom. You might notice those TV ads about the 3G connectivity of PLDT (through Smart Bro) versus that of “other” networks, and for sure, Smart Bro's download speeds are faster. That's because PLDT single-handedly possesses the bigger network backbone, and the rest (BayanTel, Globe, Eastern Telecoms) either rent bandwidth from PLDT or share bandwidth in this lone smaller backbone from pioneer commercial ISP Mozcom. All of these “rented bandwidths” cost a leg, an arm and a few first-born sons while PLDT pushes competition by making their offerings a lot cheaper.

According to this article from pioneer blogger Pinoy Tech Blog and the ranges in world broadband prices brought over by the BBC, Sweden's megabit-per-month entry-level connection was USD10.79 (P500) in the past decade. The Philippines just crossed the megabit barrier during this time, but I remember getting a 1.5Mbps connection in 2007 for P3,000 from Bayantel, and it sucked.

Of course, we can't blame the telcos. What can we blame? Politics. Not only is there politicking within and between the telcos, there's the government to consider, as well. The government, at least from cursory examination, seems to favor PLDT like a child favors the teddy bear he sleeps with at night.

Because of the lack of bandwidth (and infrastructure, probably because of businesses going real bad), these “other telcos” resorted to fighting head-on with PLDT by lowering their monthly fees, letting their users share connections without assurance of full speeds, and building a team of untrained, lowly-paid technicians, and another small team of probably-well-paid, highly-trained excuse-makers, also known as Technical Support.

But there was a move by the government that, at least, highlighted our need for another Internet backbone. Apparently, the said move or “deal” caused too much of a racket in the government, and is still allegedly the mother of all government scams during the past decade.

Postscript

If you want to just vent stress to someone about your Internet connection, call tech support. Let them know about the major slowness. If they ask you to test your bandwidth using SpeedTest.net, insist you shouldn't point your destinations to a local city, but instead send data to, say, San Francisco, Tokyo, or Los Angeles, and you'll see the difference (and see that they're not giving you the advertised bandwidth). They might also tell you that it could be your router or your computer. Computers and routers don't cause slowness (and if they did, you might have done something to it to know preemptively that your network will be slow), they cause disconnections. If the Internet is just slow, tell them it could be their lines or it could be their nearest hub from your house. Either way, you save time and patience from dealing with convoluted flowcharts of customer support procedures.

Post-postcript

Trivia: Do you know that Internet connections don't have “reserved resources”? This type of communication is called packet-based communication. Most of your favorite sites hosted in the Philippines don't get connected to your computer directly. Usually, when you trace your request routes, your request packets travel from your home, to the Philippine net backbone, to the US, and back to the Philippines (not straight to your target website) to a locally-hosted site like, say, VibalPublishing.com.  Geeks know the tool to use for this is “traceroute.”

Next: The sorry state of the Pinoy Internets: ZTE-NBN

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Speedtest.net Screenshot by the author

Comic Image clipped by the author from theOatmeal.com's “Why I'd rather be punched in the testicles than call customer service” Comic is free under fair use.