If you’re seeking accountability from your telco provider in terms of general speed improvement, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) is doing its part to ensure that they deliver.

The NTC said that they along with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) will be holding regular meetings with local telecom firms to get updates on the statuses of their respective network roll-outs and the problems they’ve encountered. The first of these bi-monthly meetings are set to take place on the first week of February.

NTC told the press that these meetings would focus on “[the] push for front-loaded implementation of telcos’ roll-out plans, particularly for the first 2 quarters of 2021.” This comes as a follow up on local telco providers’ promised improvements before 2020 ended.

In the past month, NTC has noted improvements in the country’s average internet speeds. NTC cites Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index that the country’s mobile internet connection speed has gone up to 22.50 MBPS in December which is an improvement from the 18.49 MBPS of the previous month. This improvement has raised the country’s rank to 29th from 34th among 50 Asian countries, and to 18th from 22nd out of 46 Asia Pacific countries.

In spite of the major telcos being able to meet the demands set by the president last year, they are still pressed to improved their internet speeds as the lack of improvement could mean losing business to new telco providers or worse, the loss of their franchise.

Source: 1