Saturday, October 27, 2007 ICT chief bewails fate of NBN deal
THE National Broadband Network project with China-based company ZTE Corporation was an attempt of the Arroyo administration to finally link even the country's farthest rural area with the rest of the world through Internet connection, insisted the newly appointed chair of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT).
CICT chief Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III said the NBN deal was supposed to be the Arroyo administration's answer to the clamor of the citizenry for greater access and connectivity, most especially in far flung rural communities.
Roxas-Chua was appointed as chief of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology early this month.
Instead, the NBN deal is now working against the Arroyo administration and has been deemed by some of its critics as the worst and biggest from of corruption in the history of Philippine politics.
"The NBN deal tried to address the problem of connectivity in far flung areas, which the major telecommunications company would not venture into as it is unprofitable," Roxas-Chua said in an interview last week during the 1st Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines Information and Communications Technology Convention.
However, Roxas-Chua expressed dismay that the multi-million-dollar deal would have to end up in the trash bin due to the controversy that it has caused. "It is quite unfortunate that it got the negative sentiment of the public," Roxas-Chua added.
He did not comment on the reported controversies the broadband project deal got entangled in.
Roxas-Chua believes government must start looking for other ways to provide connectivity for people in far-flung areas of the country, which is what the NBN project had intended to do.
"There is no way it's (NBN Project) going to move forward in its current form," Roxas-Chua added.
Other than providing connectivity to the people in far-flung areas, another objective of the ambitious NBN project of the Arroyo administration was to lower the cost of telecommunications in the country. "One of the visions of the commission is to serve the under-served areas which telecommunication companies find unprofitable for their business," Roxas-Chua added.
Roxas-Chua also said that as much as possible the government would not want to interfere in the information and communications technology industry and would rather leave it to the free market. If this, according to Roxas-Chua, is not attainable, then government has to intervene.
"We know it (providing access to the poor) is a problem, and we need to address it," Roxas-Chua said. (CPM)
