Government must solve Philippines internet problems — Rio

MANILA, Philippines — Solving the country’s internet woes and improving telco services is now in the hands of the government, former Department of Information and Communications Technology undersecretary Eliseo Rio said.

Rio, in a Facebook post, said the real problem is not the lack of investment from the telcos, but the red-tape which only the government can solve.

“We do not lack investments as these are already available, although not coming from government, but from the private ICT sector to fast track the installation of telecommunication infrastructure,” he said.

“The government does not need to put up any funds for telecommunication infrastructure. It only needs to facilitate the telcos to provide efficient public services, and not threaten them with expropriation. The ball is in the hands of the government,” Rio said.

Rio said the red-tape problem is real and is not an excuse by the telcos because they do not want to invest more money on their infrastructure.

He said even the foreign providers have started complaining that they had rolled-out 10 times faster in other countries, but were slowed down by red tape in the Philippines.

“Aside from the billions of pesos poured in by the telcos for infrastructure, non-telco companies, which were instrumental in putting up thousand of towers and thousand of kilometers of fiber optic cables in our neighboring countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand, are also complaining that they have not encountered so much red-tape that is drastically slowing them down here in the Philippines,” Rio said.

“The ‘illegal’ red-tape is not so much a problem as they encounter this also in other countries, they say. It is the ‘legal’ red-tape, numerous permits that require so many signatures, that is the problem,” he said.

In the past, Rio said the reputation that mobile network operators were raking in revenues much more than other companies because of texting made them targets for revenue generation by LGUs and some unscrupulous officials.

“LGUs came up with so many permits and recurring annual fees, the more the better for their revenues. These fees were only passed on by the telcos to their subscribers, which made our telecom services more expensive than other countries,” he said.

“Until around 2012, there were not much complaints from telcos on this red-tape because texting revenues made them profitable, even with the small number of towers they had. But when smartphones appeared in 2012, and internet content replaced SMS as the killer application, the red tape begun to be felt when our mobile telcos started overhauling their networks to accommodate the 3G to 4G technology,” he said.

Given these challenges, Ayala-led Globe Telecom Inc. is appealing to LGUs to rationalize fees and expedite the processing of permits to enable the industry to build the infrastructure needed to improve connectivity in the country.

“Each year, we make massive investments in billions of pesos to make our network perform at par with other countries. However, we can only go as far as what our existing infrastructure can give. If we want robust connectivity, we really need to build more cellsites and roll out more fiber to homes. The current permitting process and fee structures simply do not allow us to do these,” Globe president Ernest Cu said.

Cu said Globe has committed about 35 percent of its annual revenues to capex, one of the highest capex-to-revenue ratios in the world.

“Help us spend it to improve the digital life of the Filipino,” he said in a call for support from local government agencies.

Cu last week sought the help of President Duterte regarding the process of getting permits to build cellsites and towers, which takes at least eight months and consist of 29 to 35 permits in all.