Telecommunications Industry

[RonnieR]

Originally Posted by -SNPKLSDMBLDR-

walang matinong internet service provider sa pilipinas. halos di umaabot sa published speed ang karamihan.

ako din PLDT DSL...pretty fast.

[Retro]

New administration set to face old ICT concerns

Businessworld Online
July 13, 2010

DICT and cybercrime bills pending in Congress await action

ALMOST two weeks have passed since President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III held a press conference to name his Cabinet members. When it comes to his pick for the country’s next information technology honcho, however, the new president has kept his silence. “[The CICT is] below Cabinet. There is [still] a debate whether to transform it into a department. There is a pending measure in the legislature transforming it into a department level position,” Mr. Aquino said during the press briefing.

The Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) is a transition agency pending a resolution over the Senate Bill 2546, which seeks to create the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT).

The CICT was formed in 2004 through an executive order of former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Its creation brought together the National Computer Center of the Department of Science and Technology (DoST), the Telecommunications Office (TELOF) and the communications units of the Department of Transportation and Communications (DoTC).

Despite the clamor for its enactment from the private sector, led by the foreign chambers and the top industry groups, and despite the fact that Mrs. Arroyo certified the bill as urgent, it was never passed at the Senate before the last Congress ended last February. The bill’s counterpart in the lower house was already approved in 2008.

In a briefing held at the Malacañang last week, CICT chairman Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III said most of the employees of the agency would continue to work while awaiting for new directives from Mr. Aquino.

Two days before the presidential inauguration, two of the agency’s top officials, Mr. Chua and CICT commissioner and National Computer Center director-general Angelo Timoteo M. Diaz de Rivera said they were ready to return to the private sector should the president appoint new officials.

With even the CICT at a standstill, the industry can only wait to see whether the Aquino administration puts a conclusion on one of the local technology sector’s longest-running sagas.

In an interview, TELOF executive director Graciano Sitchon said that now is the best time to review the proposal for DICT creation. “There could be something wrong in the way the bill was packaged [which could explain] why it has not yet been passed,” Mr. Sitchon said.

Among others, he said the supposedly anomalous $329-million national broadband network deal (NBN) with China’s ZTE Corp. has made it difficult for the bill to be enacted with both the public and politicians wary about technology-related transactions.

The NBN proposal has its roots in the vision of linking government agencies nationwide through a network which the CICT was espousing in its nascent days.

There was also the lack of appreciation by the Congress on the vital role that the proposed department could play in improving the economy of the country, said Maricor M. Akol, IT practitioner and president of industry group IT Foundation of the Philippines (ITFP).

Proponents of the DICT have repeatedly argued that most developed and progressive countries have DICT counterparts.

Ms. Akol surmised that the bill failed to get the Senate’s attention because there were “too many lawyers and a lack of technocrats in Congress,” adding that the “inability of CICT to come out with more convincing and pressing arguments to an disinterested Congress” was also a factor.

Meanwhile, groups lobbying against the creation of the DICT stressed that even without the department, the industry has been able to grow. To illustrate, the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, which started its ascent in 2000, has grown to become a $7.2-billion industry employing a total of 442,164 workers as of 2009, according to government data.

“The BPO sub-sector has developed despite having no DICT. I would even hazard that if there was a DICT bureaucracy, the BPO’s growth in the country may have been stunted,” said Bienvenido Oplas, Jr. in a separate interview. “A DICT is not a must, not a necessity for the industry.”

Mr. Oplas is the president of Minimal Government Thinkers, Inc., a group that proposes minimal government intervention in business.

“The government bureaucracy should shrink and be reduced, not expand. Each new bureaucracy that is created or expanded means new taxes and fees that need to be created or expanded. And each new bureaucracy means new politics from the executive to the legislative branches,” he added.

Ms. Akol countered this claim, saying that “while the private sector has grown despite the lack of a department, the existence of one could further help its growth through more aggressive policies.”

More than overseeing the business sector, she said the proposed DICT should be on top of the government’s use of technology, which is considered as the single biggest user of ICT.

“There must be an authority that not only comes out with ICT policies but must also be able to implement these policies at the most cost-efficient/effective means [such as] the sharing of facilities, databases and networks,” she said.

Despite the new administration’s lack of a firm commitment towards the creation of a DICT, the industry remains hopeful about the future ICT directives from the new tenant of the Malacañang.

“With the prominent role that ICT had in his being elected to his position, I think that President Aquino’s stand is not to have CICT abolished… allowing said agency to renew efforts to push ICT development and work for the passage of pending bills on ICT, namely the DICT Bill and the Cybercrime Bill,” Ms. Akol said.

The Cybercrime Bill aims to identify the various types of cybercrime and prescribe corresponding punishments, including strengthening the government agencies that are tasked to handle cybercrime.

It seems that all the industry can do is wait for the new Congress to open.

[-SNPKLSDMBLDR-]

what i mean is yung sa mga wireless ISP's like smartbroken, witribe, tattoo, etc. puro di umaabot sa published speed!

[Nanflexal]

napaka-inutil talaga ng mga telco natin. Parang in-house service lang na umaasa lang sa commercial power.

panay profit lang kasi nasa isip ng mga to at pag bili ng UPS and Solar Panel at Solar battery hindi inissip, Solar Panel with enough Solar battery can prodive 4 or 10 days Power without sunlight.

Walang inisip ang mga telco nato kundi kumita. po@tang ina nyo.

[amigo32]

I got my UBNT radios

[Ady001]

Bayan revises business plan
By Mary Ann Ll. Reyes (The Philippine Star) Updated July 21, 2010 12:00 AM

MANILA, Philippines – Lopez-owned Bayan Telecommunications is revising its business plan to focus more on the growing broadband and data market and less on the wireless landline business.

Bayan managing director Fred Bernardo told The STAR that the change in the company’s business plan is being made at the request of its creditors who believe that the plan should better reflect Bayan’s current business focus.

“Actually, while the current business plan focuses on the wireless landline business as the main driver, what we have been doing is devoting more of our resources to the broadband and data business,” he said.

He pointed out that Bayan’s new business model will be closer to the original model when the company first went into corporate rehabilitation in 2004. “Somewhere along the way, the model changed and adopted the wireless landline business as the main activity. But our wireless landline business is no longer attractive as it used to be,” he said.

Last year, around P250 million that was supposedly allocated for the expansion of the wireless landline network was scrapped.

The new business plan will be submitted to both the company’s creditors and the rehabilitation court for approval.

Bernardo also revealed that for the first six months of 2010, Bayan’s revenues dropped slightly by around 2.5 percent, but earnings before interests, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) were stable compared to the same period last year and “better than budget.”

Of the company’s total revenues, more than 40 percent was generated from the broadband and data business.

And this year, of the P1.2 billion total capital expenditure, no amount was set aside for wireless landline.

Bernardo explained that because of the increasing competition in the wireless landline business, it is becoming more and more a losing proposition for Bayan.

“But we intend to keep the wireless landline business, but we will not expand it nor devote capital expenditure for it,” he said.

Bayan pioneered the wireless landline business in the country and it was a very profitable venture for the company then, but because bigger companies like Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), Globe Telecom and Digital Telecommunications Phils. (Digitel) have also entered the business, this segment has stopped growing for Bayan.

“To break-even now, you need at least 300,000 subscribers. What we have right now is around 250,000 subscribers,” Bernardo pointed out.

On the other hand, he revealed that the data business, particularly corporate data, is becoming more and more attractive for the company.

He noted that based on their customer satisfaction survey, Bayan’s corporate data business fared much better compared to its competitors.

The new business plan, he said, will focus on growing both the wireless and wired (DSL) broadband business.

Bayan earlier said it expects to grow its broadband subscriber base by double-digit rates this year, sustaining last year’s performance.

Bayan vice president for business segment Aniceto Franco III said the company’s broadband base grew 40 percent in 2009 to more than 100,000 subscribers. “We expect to maintain that rate of growth, or maybe even surpass that,” he said.

Franco said the company has been investing heavily on the National Digital Transmission Network (NDTN), a network of fiber-optic cables spanning the length of the entire country.

The NDTN is owned by a consortium composed of  Bayan (65 percent), Smart Communications, Globe, Express Telecommunications (Extelcom), Eastern Telecommunications (ETPI), Philippine Telephone & Telegraph Co. (PT&T) and Digitel.

During the first quarter of 2010, Bayan trimmed its net loss to P464 million from P556 million a year ago while its revenues improved five percent to P1.64 billion from P1.56 billion.

However, for the first half of this year, revenues went down slightly, which Bernardo said is being experienced by most telecommunications companies due to the difficult economic situation.

Bernardo said the new business model will prove to be more profitable for Bayan, but the company has no plans of exiting from rehab earlier than 2023.

Bayan’s chief executive was earlier quoted as saying that they are considering the entry of potential investors. “The telecom business is a capital intensive industry so we need big investors,” he said.

The company’s total debt had reached $325 million and is scheduled for full payment in 2023. About 92 percent of the debts are dollar-denominated.

Bayan paid its creditors P498 million last month. Of this amount, principal payment amounted to P341 million while interest payment from April to June this year reached P157 million.

In all, the Lopez-owned phone firm posted P1.68 billion in principal payment and P3.61 billion in interest payment for a total of P5.30 billion since it went into rehabilitation in July 2004.

[april boy]

More telecom players the better.

I hate the emerging oligopoly of PLDT (Smart, Talk and Text and Red Mobile), Globe (Touch Mobile and Globe) and Digitel (Digitel, Sun).

Liberty Telecom, Bayantel and Extelcom should come out and compete...

[Ady001]

Originally Posted by april boy

More telecom players the better.

I hate the emerging oligopoly of PLDT (Smart, Talk and Text and Red Mobile), Globe (Touch Mobile and Globe) and Digitel (Digitel, Sun).

Liberty Telecom, Bayantel and Extelcom should come out and compete...

I'm actually using Bayantel for almost a year now in surfing. Good for its price.

[kikodj]

Phase 9 of dmpi.. on going

[Retro]

IPv4 address exhaustion

Ivan Pepelnjak | July 16, 2010
SearchTelecom.com

Whether you choose to believe it or not, public IPv4 address space will be exhausted sometime in the next two years -- unless a miracle happens and the internet's early adopters return their Class A networks to the public pool, which would delay the inevitable by a few months or years. And what about the transition from IPv4 to IPv6?

So far, the whole internet ecosystem is successfully ignoring the impeding IPv4 address exhaustion catastrophe. Large carriers are slow to deploy IPv6 services since there's no demand for them. Low-end customer premise equipment (CPE) and mobile device makers are pretending IPv6 does not exist (as the only mobile devices supporting IPv6 on UMTS are the Symbian-based phones).

And most content providers probably don't even know what IPv6 is. Google and other big content providers are an obvious exception, since they don't want to lose a single visitor. Google will do whatever is necessary, including beginning their IPv6 transition as soon as possible.

The grim fact is that it will be impossible to get significant amounts of new public IPv4 address space in a few years. New devices (and users) will have to use IPv6 to connect to the Internet. And the very long tail -- the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities -- of the content curve will not be directly accessible to these users.

The result? Even if service providers like Comcast try to be future-oriented, invest heavily in IPv6 and work with vendors to develop the standards and gear needed to deploy IPv6, they are stuck with the need to access IPv4 servers. Dual-stack deployment -- running IPv4 and IPv6 parallel to one another -- would be an ideal solution, if only we weren't approaching public IPv4 address exhaustion.

Faced with this unenviable situation and the total indifference of large parts of the IT industry, the networking experts turned to Network Address Translation (NAT), the tool that saved them 15 years ago, but even here they couldn't agree on a single workable approach.

Early solutions to link IPv4 and IPv6: Nice try

The need to link the IPv4 and IPv6 worlds was recognized more than a decade ago, resulting in the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) Stateless IP/ICMP Translation Algorithm (SIIT) RFC 2765 and Network Address Translation -- Protocol Translation NAT-PT (RFC 2766) protocols. SIIT translates each IPv6 address into a unique IPv4 address, which is clearly useless when you're trying to solve the IPv4 address exhaustion problem.

NAT-PT did not fare any better. It tried to solve too many problems at once and failed miserably in solving any of them satisfactorily. It was rescinded in July 2007 (RFC 4966) and deemed an historic, yet defunct, document. But it's still the only translation mechanism between IPv6 and IPv4 implemented in production-grade equipment (including, among others, Juniper NetScreen and Cisco IOS devices, although NAT-PT on Cisco IOS has had a bit of a performance problem lately).

Ivan Pepelnjak is chief technology advisor at NIL Data Communications

[kikodj]

just asking. are construction pics off cell site available here?.. thanks.

[amigo32]

tower ba sinasabi mo? pagkakalam ko, tornilyo lang nila yun, assemble sa site

[kikodj]

haha.. but this is skyscraper city.. some cell site towers are skyscrapers din??

okay i'll post some... ("p)

[Retro]

I don't get it why does NTC is getting a STATE subsidies when in fact the industry they are regulating are earning billion of surplus in profits....??

State aid to GOCCs drops in June

The Manila Times.net
Saturday, 24 July 2010

STATE subsidies to non-financial government-owned and controlled corporations (GOCCs) fell in June, the Bureau of the Treasury said on Friday. Last month, the national government only disbursed P183 million, or 90.6 percent lower than the P1.94 billion released in the same period a year ago.

The Bases Conversion and Development Authority got the lion’s share of financial support at P92 million, followed by the National Livelihood and Development Corp. at P65 million, and the National Kidney and Transplant Institute (NKTI) at P8 million.

The remaining amount was shared among the Philippine Heart Center (PHC), National Dairy Authority, Philippine Health Insurance Corp., Philippine Children’s Medical Center (PCMC), Southern Philippines Development Authority, and the Lung Center of the Philippines.a

Despite the drop in last month’s subsidies, state aid to GOCCs were still seven percent higher at P7.466 billion in the first semester, as against last year’s P6.981 billion.

For the first six months, the National Food Authority enjoyed the biggest aid at P2.85 billion, followed by National Housing Authority with P1.87 billion, and National Telecommunications Commission with P1.025 billion. The fourth biggest recipient was the National Livelihood Development Corp. at P980 million.

The Philippine Coconut Authority received P244 million, while the Philippine Rice Research Institute, P174 million.

State-owned hospitals such as the NKTI, PHC and the PCMC received P169 million, P139 million and P109 million, respectively.

On Thursday, the Department of Finance vowed that it would stick to this year’s budget deficit cap of P325 billion, as it would seriously look into those GOCCs that have been a financial strain on the national government.
Katrina Mennen A. Valdez

[kikodj]

[amigo32]

puede mag patayo ng mura lang na tower? nag pa quote ako, ang mahal. milyons din pala gagastusin doon

kaya sa bundok ko na lang lagay yung radio ko.

[ajkenney]

Which gov't department controls licensing for VSAT installations? Are there any online links to the forms and/or procedures to get a license?

I'm planning on putting my own broadband link via satellite for a small island resort I live at in Palawan. There is no mobile signals there so, no 3G.

Thanks to anyone who can help!

[amigo32]

satellite is my last option.

you can use microwave radios to send DSL broadband to remote areas. you can source DSL as far as Cebu province. as long as there's line of sight between the source and the site.

[iantidz]

I believe your VSAT provider should take care for that..

Originally Posted by ajkenney

Which gov't department controls licensing for VSAT installations? Are there any online links to the forms and/or procedures to get a license?

I'm planning on putting my own broadband link via satellite for a small island resort I live at in Palawan. There is no mobile signals there so, no 3G.

Thanks to anyone who can help!

[iantidz]

Affordable ba yong price ?

Originally Posted by amigo32

I got my UBNT radios