As the Philippines is on its 15th month under the Marcos administration, Opensignal’s latest findings showed that while the internet in the Philippines has improved, the country still needs to catch up with its neighbors in Southeast Asia.

For context, Opensignal explained that while the Philippines got improvements in average download speeds with an increase of 5.9Mbps (37.7%), this dwarfs to the 17.7Mbps (112.6%) improvement in download speeds in Malaysia. This has resulted in the Philippines dropping from third to fourth in download experience, as it has been overtaken by Malaysia.

On the positive side, the gap between the Philippines and Vietnam is smaller–with the latter reporting a download speed decline of 0.7Mbps.

While internet download speeds in the Philippines show considerable improvement, the country is still in last place when it comes to upload speeds. The improvement may be better compared to Cambodia after 14 months, but it pales in comparison with Malaysia’s 2.8Mbps upload speed improvement at the same time period.

The Philippines is the most improved when it comes to Games experience, where its score has risen by 13.6% after 14 months, outpacing Indonesia, Cambodia, and Thailand. However, similar to download speeds, the Philippines is trailing behind second to last place when it comes to multiplayer mobile gaming.

With all these findings, Opensignal notes that the Marcos administration has good mobile connectivity as its key priority, which includes digitizing and streamlining most national and local government services and simplifying the permitting process for constructing new telco infrastructure. The high capital expenditure of telcos to expand their infrastructure is slowly paying off, and the Marcos Administration will need to incentivize operators to continue investing significantly in their networks to meet the President’s digitalization goals.