‘Philippines internet quality barely ready for AI workloads’

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines may be dreaming of becoming a digital powerhouse in Asia-Pacific, but the quality of its 5G network struggles to meet artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

In a study, Ookla said the Philippines has failed to meet some of the minimum requirements for higher AI tasks, particularly augmented reality (AR), exposing gaps in its digital push.

The Philippines posted a median upload of 11.97 Mbps on 5G networks, when the basic requirement to set up AR technology is 20 Mbps.

Moreover, the country ranked 14th in 22 markets worldwide on bandwidth allocation for upload.

Ookla said Philippine telcos assign barely nine percent of their 5G throughput on upload, which is essential for large language models (LLM) and agentic and voice AI.

Further, the Philippines also placed 14th on multiserver latency, or the measure of responsiveness to AI prompts under normal conditions. Ookla said it takes at least 40.2 milliseconds to receive a response from AI models in the country.

In Southeast Asia, the latency is better in Singapore (24.6 ms), Malaysia (33 ms), Thailand (37.7 ms) and Indonesia (38.4 ms), all meeting the industry standard for voice AI of less than 40 ms.

The 40.2-ms latency of the Philippines works best only for simple AI functions like LLM, but it will stumble in keeping up when prompted for voice AI and AR solutions.

Compared to Southeast Asian peers, the country also recorded the worst latencies when linking to cloud platforms Amazon Web Service (104 ms), Azure (106 ms), Google Cloud (88 ms) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (133 ms).

As a whole, Ookla said the 22 markets covered by the study have shown varied performance on 5G quality. This means that many are ready for simple AI tasks, while a few are now capable of handling more complex automation.

AR, for instance, refers to the technology that allows digital information like images and texts to be integrated with the real-world surroundings of a user. AR requires AI to process stock data, so it can produce the best experience and interaction.

The Philippines is making a case to become a digital powerhouse in Asia-Pacific, eyeing to land the next investment projects of some of the world’s tech leaders.

The country’s largest telcos PLDT Inc. and Globe Telecom Inc. are leading the push by building data centers where applications and information can be stored.