via gmanews.tv

Actually, anybody can easily compare one country's broadband service to the others at speedtest.net and at netindex.com. They have detailed yet easy to understand analytics. I checked out a few of them about a week or so ago and let me show you some of them.

This was at around 1:38am Monday dawn.  The service that I pay for is 1 megabits per second. When I signed up for it, the installers said I should expect at least 0.6 Mbps all the time. At that time, I thought it was ludicrous but the installers said this type of subscription is WiMax thus state-of-the-art (at that time). When they did the testing, I was getting more than 1 Mbps so I gave in and signed the contract. 

But as you can see, that night I was only getting a third of what 1 mbps WiMax is supposed to be and half of what the installer promised.

Here are the top 10 countries ranked based on download speeds.

Those South Koreans have awesome internet download speeds!

Way down the list is the PH at number 116. On a positive note, we're now up 23 spots from 139 last January.  

I did not bother with the upload speeds since those are directly related with the download speeds.

Another metric that's interesting is the quality index. Vietnam right there is a surprise. Good on them.

Absent from the list is that big powerful country called the US. Not too surprising since Obama himself admits they don't have the best in broadband infrastructure.

The PH at number 52 with a quality index of 73%. I think it's relatively good but still way below the worldwide mean of 82%.

Now this one is most interesting because this measures the actual speed subscribers are getting versus what is promised. Check out the top 10 countries.

The PH is at rank 43 with a promise index of 73%, 12 points below the worldwide mean.

South Korea is taking the lead today in broadband service and it looks like it will only going to continue:

By the end of 2012, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States.

via nytimes.com

Ok, getting outrageous speeds just like South Korea would probably be too ambitious for the PH but we should at least start working on getting the advertised speed. Quality over quantity. My opinion is that while getting 100% of the advertised speed is difficult to impossible, we should at least be promised *and get* at least 85% to 90% of it at 85% to 90% of the time. It is only proper and justified.

The NTC has not yet finalized their memo on this and I'm closely watching it. It should put some regulations towards broadband reliability and quality.

I'm not too sure what to think about the news on PLDT acquiring about 52% share on Digitel (they operate Sun Cellular) only that it may limit competition among telcos and ISPs.

Under the new leadership the paired networks will continue to the expansion of broadband rollout and other next generation technologies in both fixed and wired services.

via philstar.com

In response, Globe announced that they are allocating a good amount of it's recent capex of $500 million is to improve network quality. 

“For this year, we are looking at the continued enhancement of network facilities and operations to yield better quality and greater reliability for calls, text messaging and data services,” he said.

via sunstar.com.ph

I'm not very good at analyzing business trends and all that jazz so I'm just going to say that we'll just have to watch and see. The good thing is that we still have choices and it is with these choices that we are empowered. Currently, I'm subscribed to a service that allows me to download HD movies for my wife and kids and allows me to surf at good enough speeds to read up on news and listen to music. A lot of times the service try to test my patience but the good thing is that when my contract runs out, I can easily switch to a better one if my current provider continues to be sucky.

Let me conclude this four-part series by listing three recommendations to us users in order make our internet lives a bit better.

1. Ask what you are getting - If you have yet to sign up for a service, make sure that you know everything about it down to the fine print. The first step to taking action is by being aware. If you are aware of what you are getting prior to signing up, at least you know what to expect. You will know what you can and can't complain about if you are aware.
2. Call your ISP *every time* the service goes down - A big reason why most services (not just broadband) suck is because consumers tolerate it. Americans are known to be very demanding and call center agents can attest to that. We need to do the same. Call them and make them accountable to the service that they are providing. Alternatives: @tweet them on their twitter timelines or post on their Facebook walls to complain in public. This works most of the time. And, last but not least...
3. Don't change your habits - Don't stop downloading videos & other files and don't cut down on your surfing or social networking. Even if you do, the rest of us are not going to stop anyway so why don't you just join the movement of the "horny pirates." Every ISP in the world must realize that the barebones networks they currently have are not enough. They need to start facing the reality - majority of internet activity is moving towards the cloud and to maintain a high quality of internet activity, bandwidth has to expand. They need to future-proof their infrastructure by investing in better technology and it has to start with us, users, by clogging the friggin' airwaves.