IT WOULD certainly make a nice Christmas gift?
I mean, it would, wouldn’t it?
After all, it was one of the promised reforms of President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration.
And it has been, what, almost three years? Don’t you think it’s time that he starts making good on at least one of his vows?
Or maybe he already has.
And that might explain why Globe Telecom announced that it was erecting 111 cellular sites in the Visayas, 22 of which would be in Cebu.
So the cell sites are in various stages of development, but most of these will be up by the third or fourth quarter of this year.
You know what that means, don’t you?
By December, Cebuanos and residents of the Visayas will have “a faster and more reliable internet connection.” At least, that was what a Globe Telecom official said earlier this week.
Of course, you’ll have to be a Globe subscriber to avail yourself of this “miracle.”
There is cause to pause. And to hope. And to pray for deliverance from this backwater of the global computer network.
In our neck of the woods, Singapore has the fastest average internet speed with an average of 20.3 Megabits per second (Mbps) followed by Thailand, which has an average speed of 16 Mbps.
And where is the Philippines in this picture? Well, it comes in last with 5.5 Mbps, of course.
This data came out in the first quarter 2017 report State of the Internet by US-based network company Akamai, which didn’t include internet speeds in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and Brunei, but only probably because Akamai didn’t want to embarrass the Philippines for coming in last.
Nah, I’m just kidding. Or maybe I’m not.
When I checked, it turned out that Cambodia-yes, that Cambodia-had the third fastest 4G LTE speed among six Asean countries, according to OpenSignal’s November 2016 State of LTE report.
And the Philippines? Well, you take a wild guess.
But you know what? Martin Luther King wasn’t the only one with a “dream.” Like him, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt... that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunities” for quicker, faster and more reliable access to this great liberator of information that we call the internet.
So maybe things are really looking up for us.
The latest state of the internet report released by Ookla, an internet analytics company, says that overall internet speeds increased last year due to telecoms steadily building new infrastructure, which makes it easier for us to hang on to that optimism.
And so maybe, just maybe, next year, Cebuanos will have a faster means of accessing Pornhub.