Come out of the cell

Our leader Benigno Simeon, aka BS, coming out of his shell in Malacañang recently, just could not stop himself from counting the blessings of the entire Filipino nation coming from him.

Maybe he could not wait for others to praise the Aquino (Part II) administration for all its amazing and unsurpassable feats in the past six years.

Thus, he just had to admire his performance by himself, and went on to rate himself as the most outstanding president of the republic in the past and in the future.

Lately, as he journeyed across the land, apparently to campaign for his chosen candidates, he rattled off his miraculous deeds: highest economic growth rates, lowest unemployment rates and highest poverty alleviation rate.

The business sector had shown in various studies that those claims were debatable, if not outright spurious.

They seemed to be based on doubtful statistics, for one.

The economic growth rates, for instance, did not consider the smuggling woes in the past years, which according to Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima was so massive it had denied the state some P200 billion a year in revenue.

The unemployment rates ignored the dramatic rise in the number of underemployed.

As for poverty alleviation, our dearest leader, BS, did not say that his administration also spent some P400 billion for the CCT program, and studies showed that most of the CCT beneficiaries actually remained poor as ever.

By and large, the main beef of the business community against this administration was that it did not seem to bother itself with pretending to try to address even just a bit the concern in business about the poor infrastructure in this country.

The telecom industry, for instance, was up in arms recently against the tedious process of securing permits for cell sites, because it practically required more steps than the Eiffel Tower.

Now, here was one technical description of those telecom towers: “Cell sites transmit radio frequency signals that enable voice and data services in a given geographic area, simultaneously supporting multiple handsets, operating in different frequencies and maintaining customer connectivity even while they are in transit.”

In other words, we needed more cell sites for faster–and hopefully clearer–signals for Internet connections, texts and calls.

The business community has been throwing tantrums over the poor telecom service, what with the Philippines having the second slowest Internet connection in Asia, beating only Afghanistan.

At the same time, the Aquino (Part II) administration never hesitated to credit itself for the fantastic growth in the so-called BPO sector, the very same business that needed fast and clear Internet connections.

The truth was that the “business process outsourcing” sector did not need any push from the government. It was said that the sector would have grown “regardless of any economic condition” in the country.

In fact, the country’s BPO revenue was seen to exceed $25 billion this year. By 2020, revenue would hit $55 billion.

The projections would likely happen even with awful economic management under any government that has neglected the infrastructure needs of the business community.

Just imagine what the BPO sector would have accomplished with seamless Internet connections, if only we could come out of this crisis over the simplest of the technologies involved in mobile telephony, those freaking cell cites!

On the surface, the fault seemed to lie on the telecom sector for the poor Internet service in the country, because it did not upgrade the systems to catch up with the new technology in Internet connectivity.

It would be most unfair to blame it all on the telecom companies.

Globe Telecom, for instance, had  already invested a fortune to upgrade its systems to the latest broadband technology called LTE.

The problem was that the telecom sector did not have enough cell sites  to cope with the rising demand, with Smart and Globe combining for only 15,000 cell sites, giving the Philippines lowest rank in Asia.

China has more than a million cell sites, while Vietnam has some 55,000. Even Bangladesh has more than 27,000.

Like it or not, the issue was the congestion in those limited number of towers. Really, our cell sites could be more crowded than any MRT-Edsa station during rush hours.

Although the telcos wanted to expand their network to improve the service, they said they  had to go through monstrous hurdles called government permits.

An executive of Globe described the procedure at the barangay level as “challenging.”

Telcos should also get a “mayor’s permit” for every cell site, with the fees varying depending on the rates prescribed by various local revenue codes.

Some LGUs also have specific ordinances imposing fees of P40,000 to P200,000 on the telcos per tower per year.

Other LGUs required all sorts of “clearance” from the local legislative council, on top of those from the DENR and the homeowners associations.

The telcos would have to secure the “consent” of everybody residing within the “radial distance” of the cell site, which could mean thousands of families that could not tell cell sites from shell fish.

Yet everybody agreed this country needed several thousands of new cell sites to upgrade its telecom service.

So what should the government do about it—nothing?