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Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Broadband to become a basic service in RP
By Jessica B. Natad
Sun.Star Staff Reporter
As the country joins the world in the global knowledge or information eco-nomy, broadband or wide Internet access will soon become a basic service rather than a luxury.
This, as telecommunication companies in the country like Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) and Innove Communications are deploying broadband access networks much more aggressively than in the past, according to PLDT and Smart Communications president Napoleon Naza-reno.
“The future will be broadband. In the next three to five years, broadband Internet access will become commonplace.
Rather than a luxury, it will be a basic service accessible to more people from all walks of life all over the country,” he told participants to the InTourPreneur 2006 conference at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino last week.
“The Philippines has actually come a long way, from rotary phone dialer, to cordless landline phones to mobile phones to 3.5G. From calling to texting to e-mailing using this tiny piece of gadget to making it into a wallet, in our case a service we call G-Cash, to watching movies and seeing the person on the other side of the line,” Gil Genio, Innove Communications chief operating officer, said in the same event.
Ultra-high
With the arrival of 3G, our case 3.5G or HSDPA, the data speed is even five times faster. All contributing to an explosion of demand for broadband, whether wired or wireless,” he added.
He said most corporate customers have applications that are bandwidth-hungry, demanding ultra-high speed access.
“Gone are the days when multinational companies require 64 kilobyte per hour—you don’t hear large corporations asking for those speeds anymore. Today, we’re talking 155 megabytes per second,” Genio said.
PLDT’s Nazareno said the broadband revolution is a challenge for telecommunications companies in the country, which have fallen behind other Asian countries in terms of Internet penetration.
He said the Philippines ranked 12th, below Indonesia and Vietnam, among the 14 countries in the Asia-Pacific in terms of Internet penetration.
But driven by the need to build new sources of revenues, telecom companies are aggressively investing on broadband.
Among the developments in information and communications technology in the country are more DSL lines for fixed lines, the use of wireless broadband as a consumer service from being mainly for business applications, and the cellular going into broadband through the 3G or third generation technology.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (June 27, 2006 issue)
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