Why Can't I Have An Ultra-Fast Internet!?

MANILA: Does President Rodrigo Duterte’s new creation, the Department of Information Communications & Technology, or DiCT, have the power to harvest the wealth of the digital universe for the Filipino people? And does Mr Duterte’s appointed Secretary of Information Rodolfo Salalima have the manager’s mind to run the DiCT in the information superhighway? Let me Google that and we will see. But how fast?

Or rather, Mr Salalima has failed himself already as Information Secretary. Last year yet, on Monday, 07 November 2016, he told ANN, “Next year will be the start of us making the Internet faster” (author not named, CNN Philippines, cnnphilippines.com). He said the DiCT was going to spearhead a Telco Summit in January 2017 “to discuss how to improve Internet speed and connectivity in the Philippines, considered to be one of the slowest in Asia.”

No, Mr Salalima. The Internet in the Philippines is not one of the slowest; the situation is worse than that –
The Philippines is 14th or dead last in Internet speed in Asia Pacific 
(Abe Olandes, 10 October 2016, Philippine Star, philstar.com). We are at 4.3 Mbps; Vietnam is 5.1 Mbps, China 5.2 Mbps, Sri Lanka 5.7 Mbps; #1 is South Korea with 27 Mbps. The Filipino is not used to being utterly, absolutely last. For call center agents and virtual assistants in this country, to borrow from the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, we need the Internet to run twice faster than that just to stay in place!

And, Mr Salalima, where is the Telco Summit you were talking about 3 months ago to happen last month yet? I can't find any report on it. It must be that either I am a snail-paced Googler,
or your emails with your attachments have not finished uploading yet,
or have not reached their recipients yet,
or the recipients have not finished downloading your attachments yet,
or the recipients’ replies have not reached you yet,
or your action plan has not been thoroughly discussed yet,
all because of the s...l...o...w... Internet connection in this country!

So, what have you been doing about it?

I sympathize thoroughly with Mauro Gia Samonte, columnist of the Manila Times, loudly protesting about his uncooperative, un-business-like SmartBro connection ("Isn’t Smart guilty of highway robbery?" 18 February 2017, manilatimes.net):

FINALLY, I lose my cool. I spend the whole day writing this column, confident that I have started early enough to beat the deadline, only to find out that just when I am ready to send the manuscript through the email facilities of SmartBro, the network is down – again for the damn umpteenth time.

And then he does a Duterte, a pi, which is neither Greek nor math. (I won't quote him here.) He says, "These (are) terribly trying circumstances." Duh! He says further:

It is not an infrequent downing Smart does of its system. There is not a day that passes without my computer registering a “No Internet Access” notice on the monitor. In times when you are just browsing through your Facebook or Twitter page, it seems no big deal. You can just turn to Microsoft Word and resume writing your magnum opus from which you have just diverted actually for a little breather.

And that, he says, is "just unconscionable, unpardonable, unforgivable, utterly condemnable affront to freedom of expression!"

So, what else is new?

Mr Samonte has considered switching networks. But he is not up to it. Because, he says, "that same hurt affects millions of others, that's otra cosa." (something else)

And that’s what finally gets me riling now. I realize the racket is victimizing not just me but the millions of others who daily get loads of SmartBro. Just compute a million loaders having average daily loads of P100 each, that’s a staggering P100,000,000 worth of services paid for but not delivered every time Smart downs its internet facilities – or the equivalent portion of that amount corresponding to the many hours consumed by the downing.

So, is SmartBro guilty of highway robbery? In that case, SmartBro is guilty of information highway robbery!

So, what has the DiCT been doing about it?

In my case, I abandoned my many years of frustration with SmartBro and switched to PLDT Ultera in May of last year. So? Ultera is more reliable and faster than SmartBro, but I don't want my Internet faster – I want it ultra-fast! I'm thinking of my incessant blogging and, therefore the intermittent interruption of slow or no Internet connection – I upload a long essay of 1K plus words almost every other day and have been doing that in the last 10 years, such that I have an uncontested claim of being "the world's most highly original, creative writer online" (see my other blog, A Magazine Called Love, blogspot.com). By way of numbers, I have at least 1,500 long essays uploaded since 2007 – so, multiply 1,500 by the number of times that the Internet is down or slow and you get my infinite level of frustration – and patience. Still, I want my Internet to run very much faster than my patience to run out.

The image above shows my WiFi Ultera speedtest using Windows 10 today, 18 February 2017 (speedtest.net). The results are 2.06 Mbps, or megabits per second, for download; 0.63 Mbps for upload. Download is the speed at which your computer “reads” data in some source PC somewhere in the world loading “down” to yours. Data is either a webpage, program, music, pdf or something else. Upload, the opposite of download, is the speed at which your PC reads your own data and transfers it to another PC, such as in sending an email with attachment, or sending up an image to illustrate your blog post, or a late column in text. My download speed is 48% slower than the average PH of 3.9 Mbps (http://testmy.net/country/ph).

So, is my Ultera Slow, Average, or Fast? It’s Very Slow.

Like Mr Samonte, I'm also thinking of the millions of other Internet denizens using SmartBro or Ultera or something else.

"Only determined government intervention can remedy the situation," Mr Samonte says, and points to the National Telecommunication Commission, or NTC. Instead of the NTC, I point to the DiCT and Mr Salalima.

Mr Salalima, I have just read your message in your department's website where you say (undated, dict.gov.ph):

The DICT should be the vanguard of change. In this era where basic services driven or supported by information and communication technologies (ICTs), the DICT shall be the pioneer agency in the adoption and incorporation of these innovations to government services.

It is essential that the Department acts, not unlike Prometheus, spreading knowledge like wildfire to the nation, and thus forever changing the traditional way of doing things better with the enabling power of technology. Based on the principle of citizenry empowerment, the DICT takes its stake on the Filipino people as catalyst of change with the power of ICT.

Using your own metaphor, Mr Salalima, right from the beginning since you as head of the DiCT failed to deliver on your simple promise of a Telco Summit last month to begin to solve the problem of slow Internet in our country, I take it that you are Prometheus Bound! @

10 February 2017. Total word count, excluding this line. 1213