Survey says PH internet speed picked up in Q3

The Philippines raced ahead of its peers in terms of mobile internet speed in Asia-Pacific, but remained a laggard in fixed-line broadband, United States-based Akamai Technologies said in a new report this week.

In Akamai’s State of the Internet Report covering the third quarter of 2016, the Philippines had an average mobile connection speed of 13.9 megabits per second (mbps), better than Australia and Japan, which recorded 12.8 mbps and 11.6 mbps, respectively.

Incumbent telcos PLDT Inc. and Globe Telecom had earlier promised better mobile internet speeds following the acquisition of San Miguel Corp.’s telco unit on May 30. The Philippines ranked the 6th fastest in mobile internet speed during the second quarter of 2016, according to Akamai.

The report, however, did not tackle availability of service or coverage. It focused only on how fast the mobile internet is when connected, not the ease or difficulty of getting internet connection. This is also a very common complaint among local telco subscribers, with some areas in the city having very weak signal.

Despite those gains, the Philippines also remained near the bottom in the region in broadband speed and adoption.

Akamai data for the third quarter this year showed the Philippines with an average connection speed of 4.2 mbps. By this measure, the Philippines was the second-slowest in the region after India, which recorded 4.1 mbps.

South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore led by this measure, with average connection speeds of 26.3 mbps, 20.1 mbps and 18.2 mbps, respectively.

This underscored the need for more investments in this area as well as government support in terms of cutting bureaucratic red tape.

President Duterte has repeatedly threatened PLDT and Globe with plans to bring in new foreign competitors if they failed to deliver on promises to improve  services to the public.

Akamai noted in its report on mobile internet connectivity that the Philippines had less than 25,000 so-called unique IPv4 addresses that it classified as mobile.

It said that average connection speed measurements could also be influenced by the use of proxies within mobile networks, although in a “less pronounced” manner than when considering average “peak” connection speeds.