IT has long been established that the Philippines has been lagging behind its Asian neighbors and other countries in the world in its Internet services because it does not have enough cell sites for this fast growing industry.
The Philippines has only 16,000 cell sites, compared to Vietnam which has 65,000. We need about 50,000 more cell sites to serve the 67 million Filipino Internet users today. President Duterte himself cited this lack when, at the start of this year, he called for a third telecommunications firm in the country.
At a recent public consultation at the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) on a common tower policy – one of the means proposed to solve the problem of too few cell sites in the country – presidential adviser on ICT and economic affairs Ramon Jacinto called for a maximum of two independent and private tower companies.
Several companies interested in building telecom towers in the country immediately opposed the idea of limiting the building of cell sites to two independent and private tower companies. “We need more companies if you want a reliable industry,” said an official of American Tower Corp., one of six foreign firms interested in joining the country’s telcom expansion program. Having only two companies in the program does not make sense, said the official of another firm, Frontier Tower. The official of still another interested firm from Norway, Telenor, said there should be no cap on the number of providers seeking to help increase the number of Philippine cell sites.
Limiting cell providers to two firms is one of the rules proposed for the common cell tower policy planned by the government to expand Internet services. Other proposed rules include one that provides that the tower firms must be independent of mobile network operators and another that the telcos must not own any equity in the tower firms to assure equity in access and transparency in leasing arrangements.
Whatever is finally decided on this matter of tower companies, it must be stressed that the reason the present Internet servers in the country – Globe and Smart – have not been able to set up as many cell sites as they want is the great difficulty they have encountered in getting permits from local government units. It takes 25 permits and eight months to build one cell site, they said, and there is no standard amount of tower fees charged by various local governments.
Still, the disagreement on towers is an indication that we are moving forward in te effort to speed up and improve Internet services in the country. The towers will help, especially since here are so many firms interested in building them under the new government program, but a key element needed for the success of the program to improve the country’s Internet services is getting the support of local governments in getting the needed cell sites set up all over the country.
