The way it is: The Philippine Internet and Making It

Better
Victor Barreiro Jr.
Published 2:45 PM, Jun 12, 2014 | Updated 4:45 PM, Jun 12, 2014

Source : [Link]

MANILA, Philippines The state of the Philippine Internet is lackluster compared to

quite a number of other countries in the world, partly because of a costly speed-toprice differentialand partly because our speeds do not stack up to the global
average.
Based on a number of different analyses of Internet speeds, it can be said that we
have anaverage Internet speed of anywhere from 2.0 to 3.6 Megabits per second
(Mbps). Information from Ookla's NetIndex study of mobile data speeds shows that
the Philippines has an average of 3.9 Mbps in that sector.
These, however, are seen as the top average speeds for Internet connectivity, and
the reality is we all get speeds lower than advertised. Why is the Internet in the
Philippines the way it is?
I had a talk with Bayani Lara, Supervising Science Research Specialist at the
Department of Science and Technology's Advance Science and Technology Institute
(DOST-ASTI) and part of the team that runs the Philippine Open Internet Exchange
(PHOpenIX).
I asked for his thoughts on why the country's Internet is slow, how IP Peering works,
and what can be done to improve the Philippines' Internet speeds. I came away with
the realization that there isn't an easy fix to the situation the country's in.
Lara referred to the May 28 Senate hearing when it came time to discuss why the
Internet is slow. According to the Senate hearing, "basically what they're saying is
(there's) oversubscription and congestion."

Dissecting that answer, we first come across the issue of determining

oversubscription in the country. Lara explained that it was difficult to get data from
telecommunications companies and the National Telecommunications Commission
(NTC) to get an objective view of the situation. As a result, the observations Lara
and his team can make only come from analyzing the networks themselves relative
to general use.
According to Lara, one observation was that people and companies get what
they pay for. By this, he explained that "businesses, since they pay for very
expansive leased lines, they really get the 1:1 ratio of connectivity."
This ratio, he explained, relates to the speed going from your home or office modem
to the service provider, and then from the service provider going out to the
intended site or destination. While most of the speeds going from homes or
businesses to the service provider tend to be the same, the difference lies in the
second bit: the path from provider to the intended destination.
What happens is that those who pay more such as businesses get a faster
connection going out from the service provider to the intended site or destination,
while those who pay less used shared infrastructure for the same purpose. The
shared infrastructure tends to have more people and is thus slower as a result.
While this particular issue is, he said, "tolerated to some extent" in other countries,
Lara thought the issue of oversubscription may need to be looked into. While he
noted there was a level of acceptable oversubscription due to the ebb and flow of
people using the Internet at different times, when you get past a certain level of
oversubscription the overall service degrades.
IP peering in the Philippines
Our discussion then turned to an issue that Globe is in favor of yet Smart is against:
IP peering.
IP peering is when two networks exchange traffic with each other freely, benefiting
both parties in terms of improved performance, better capacity for handling large

amounts of traffic, or a host of other possible benefits. The discussion of IP peering

has spawned a [Link] petition as well, urging PLDT to agree on IP peering.
In my discussion with Lara, he laymanized it by saying that IP peering keeps the
local exchange of traffic within the borders of the country. He explained it by
imagining an email exchange between two people on networks that don't peer with
each other.
"For example," he explained, "if you're on a Globe connection and you want to send
an email to a PLDT connection, they don't connect with each other. They don't peer
with each other."
"What will happen is that your email through your Globe ISP will go out of the
country." He explained that it might route somewhere, whether it be Singapore or
Hongkong or some other country. He added that it will then find its way to PLDT,
then will use PLDT's network to get back to your friend.
Lara explained that this route is very expensive, takes longer to get the email to the
other person, and that some of the costs may get thrown back to consumers.
When it came time to the issue of why PLDT and Globe were in disagreement about
IP peering, he felt there was a misunderstanding somewhere.
Based on the press releases given by the companies, Lara felt the parties aren't
saying everything. "What the big company is saying our number one telco is that
it will give undue advantage to the smaller networks."
What the second largest telco and other smaller players are saying, according to
Lara, is that they support IP peering because it makes the local network faster.
IP peering, Internet exchanges, and speed
Lara first discussed the argument of those supporting IP peering. One thing that IP
peering encourages, he noted, was local content sites or services such as news
websites, e-commerce sites, and other Philippine-based websites.

If a central Internet exchange was in place where telecoms companies, Internet

service providers, and local and foreign companies could all link up and peer with
each other, this would mean faster connectivity to most sites and services with less
overall cost to many companies.
Companies and individuals in the Philippines would host their sites or services in the
Philippines because it would be faster. Foreign companies, such as Yahoo, Facebook,
or Google, would also post local caches in the country to make sites or services load
faster.
The problem with a lack of IP peering is that foreign companies don't have a
centralized place to post caches that will affect everyone, forcing them to either
host multiple caches at a larger overall expense, choose one company over another
to give uneven caching coverage, or ignore the Philippines entirely as a destination
for caches.
The undue advantage
Going back to the issue of undue advantage for smaller networks, Lara noted the
concerns of larger networks, saying that smaller players such as local ISPs would be
able to take advantage of the infrastructure set in place by PLDT without much
benefit to PLDT itself.
The issue with this reasoning, however, is that there isn't much of an alternative as
a result of the duopoly between PLDT-slash-Smart and Globe. One extreme would be
that a small, local ISP would try to build his own nationwide infrastructure just for
this purpose.
Lara then juxtaposed this with an earlier statement he remembered during the days
when PLDT bought Digitel. He noted an earlier stance of PLDT, saying that a smaller
number of players are needed in the country so finite resources such as the
wireless spectrum to deliver 3G, LTE, and other signals would be better used.
"They [PLDT in this case] don't want the smaller guys to ride settlement-free over
their infra[structure], and they also don't want these smaller guys to build their own
infra." Their alternative, Lara posits, is that smaller players should pay to use PLDT's

infrastructure. Globe, however, doesn't want to do that when there is a more viable
alternative available: peering and competing properly.
The remaining option is the current state of the Internet in the Philippines: a lack of
IP peering.
"Bottom line," Lara explained, "we cannot stay in the status quo where the network
exchange between the local networks is going out of the country. If their answer is
that they have no alternative, that can't be, because it's the users who suffer."