The average Internet speed in the country is steadily improving since President Duterte took office in 2016.
Acting Department of Information and Communications Technology Secretary Eliseo Rio said that under the Duterte administration, the average download speed for mobile and fixed broadband has increased to 14.73 megabytes per second (97.98 percent) and 18.66 Mbps (135.90 percent), respectively, in April 2019.
Before that, the average download mobile and fixed broadband speed was only 7.44 Mbps and 7.91 Mbps, respectively.
During Duterte’s first year in office, Akamai, a world-renowned distributed computing platform, cited the Philippines, Thailand, and China for leading the Asia-Pacific region in terms of Internet speed improvement with a 20 percent quarterly boost.
It also gave a positive forecast for the Philippines’ state of the Internet after Duterte approved a plan to deploy a national broadband network with an estimated cost of $1.5 billion to $4 billion (P77 billion to P200 billion).
Consistent with Akamai’s forecast, the quarterly trend of the Philippines’ average Internet speed for both mobile and fixed broadband has been on an upward trend and has even doubled from third quarter of 2016 (7.77 Mbps for mobile and 8.40 Mbps for broadband) to first quarter of 2019 (14.71 Mbps for mobile and 19.31 for broadband) based on Speedtest® reports by Ookla®.
In 2015, the Philippines had the lowest average connection speed among surveyed Asia-Pacific countries at 2.5 Mbps. (Chito A. Chavez)
