QUEZON City, Philippines (February 15) – 256 kbps and lower. That’s the promised allotment of data transfer given to each of the users of free Wi-Fi in selected public places that was launched by Department of Science and Technology’s Information and Communications Office (DOST-ICTO) last year. They proudly said, “Hey, it’s available 24/7 and free!”. Our response? It’s not enough. That speed is not worth the taxpayers’ money.
To enlighten you all, 256 kbps is the lowest speed requirement in broadband service. If you call that slow, all the more when those kilobits are slashed due to presence of fair use policy. With only 256 kbps or less powering your browser, you can only surf web pages in standard HTML form or watch videos with buffering time much longer than the actual span of the vid. It’s common sense not to download any media with that speed. Talk about turtles.
What’s more outrageous is that there is a daily usage cap. They classified it in user “levels”. A level 1 user is entitled to 50 MB (1GB monthly) per day, level 2 gets 100MB (2GB monthly), and level 3 with 300 MB (3GB monthly). All of them are entitled to the same speed, 256 kbps. The only perk of level 3 users is the “high assurance” of having the sluggish three figure speed with no reductions.
No wonder why major telcos and internet service providers (ISP’s-slash-cheaters) didn’t dare to lower their rates.Their 3.5 MB average and often less (still slow) is better than having the public snail connection. Dilemma is common in a country like ours, and choosing the lesser evil is not a new scene.
Service is nothing without quality. If only people would only get the service that worth their contributions and pay, then the world would be a little fair; even in just a matter of megabits and googling.
(written by Rex Felix C. Salvador I, edited by Jay Paul Carlos, additional research by Lovely Ann Cruz)
