The Broadband Connection In The Philippines

I woke up this morning without Internet connection to my personal computer. Am I surprised? Definitely not. In our third world country, Internet disconnection is so frequent that having none of it in a day will be a surprise if not a gift to a subscriber by our service provider. What makes the normal situation unbearable is that our disconnection happen on a weekend when our children would be at home and there are four (4) of us suffering from it. The worst thing is, when I called my ISP’s customer care helpdesk, all that the poor girl on the other line can do is apologize for the inconvenience and give me a reference number and an instruction to wait for seventy-two (72) hours for their technical people to do their job. Today being a Sunday, I do not expect my regular Internet subscription to be back because my ISP has no technician who can attend to my connection problem. Sometimes, ordinary days are not any better.

The above situation is not unique to me. It is happening to practically all broadband Internet subscribers in the Philippines so you might wonder how i-cafés survive this situation. The i-café business, which is entirely dependent on its broadband Internet connection, has to endure this common happening and if revenue could warrant has to get a second ISP to ensure continuity in a day’s operation. This is bad for the business because it would mean doubling the expense on Internet connection.

Let me add another common thing among the Internet service providers in our country. When you subscribe to say, 3Mbps bandwidth, never expect that you will get the speed that you will pay for. The specified bandwidth is just a burst speed which you may get once in a while. You will be lucky if you will get fifty (50%) percent of their promised bandwidth fifty (50%) percent of the time. If you complain, you will get the explanation that yours is a shared connection so you will get your subscribed bandwidth if the other subscribers on your network are not online. I wonder when can we get out of this predicament.

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