Best Posts in Thread: Poe bats for establishment of ICT hub in Dumaguete

Not wishing to appear negative, but if you can't get the basics right, roads, traffic, sewage, water and electricity, how can you encourage investment here. Poe is just saying whatever is necessary to get votes. Anybody that has an internationally recognised skill, heads for the exit door.

 

And then there is history, which creates a solid template.

Just about every rich nation of today followed the same basic template. They started agricultural. They moved into the cities to do manufacturing. They then moved up the value chain to provide services from the base on which manufacturing built as wages rose and the manufacturing jobs went to other places.

It seems the prudent move would be to follow the same template.

Who knows though. Was China cheaper because of cheap labor? Or was China cheaper in part because the country didn't have laws to protect their environment from being destroyed by factories? We just exported the pollution as much as we exported the labor.

The Philippines is in a race against the clock. Manufacturing and BPO industries both have guns aimed at their heads. Soon all of this work will be automated. As the West debates universal income from potentially massive job losses and inequality, the Philippines...

?
It will be interesting.

 

Another issue is that the internet isn't generally available to the poor. When waitresses in this town are making under 200 pesos per day, it's too expensive to dish out much cash for mobile internet and internet cafes.

Facebook is free. Sure, maybe they should ask Facebook to establish bases here rather than the U.S. military.

Smart phones, for those who can afford them, are just shiny gadgets. They aren't even useful enough to qualify as smartphones except by name. The kids I help out each got smart phones from their mother and they still want to borrow mine. :P They don't have enough RAM to run anything but the browser and the crap apps which ship with them.

PC's are even worse because people here can't afford the jump in electricity, nevermind the cost of internet and the hardware.

Personally, I find that I can do my tech gigs just fine with the current speeds. There are more factors. Faster internet is great, but corruption is regularly cited as a barrier to foreign investment. Technical expertise is lacking and BPO isn't an inspiring industry to capture the imagination of students.

I think in general you need to promote a forward looking culture, embracing technology and imagining how it can be used to transform society.

This is really difficult because the infrastructure is lacking in so many other areas. If it weren't for e-commerce, I'm not sure you would have much of an internet in the West. Here, e-commerce is nearly non-existent because nobody has a way to e-PAY. Bank accounts are out of the reach of many. Few vendors but the largest corps accept anything but cash. The payment services provided by Smart and Globe are promising, but they haven't hit mass adoption. The delivery system is of unknown reliability and I don't know how to even communicate an address to anyone.

Of course, the lack of money hurts, but people still transact. Even with small money there is a lot of marketing activity here. We may not see an Uber here anytime soon, but it should be doable to easily pay pedicab drivers by mobile even with a feature phone. Everyone should be able to move money without carrying around an ATM card. A mobile service on which I can pay someone 6 pesos for a bar of soap has far more utility here than an ATM machine which spits out 100's as the smallest currency and often only dispenses 1000's. There is a problem when the currency I pull out of the ATM is so out of whack with the local economy that I can't even purchase something with it at many local small businesses because they don't have change.

The Philippines needs small-time entrepreneurs and curious tinkerers who can tackle local facing issues rather than attempting to be like everyone else. These are the things that government can help encourage. I don't see how faster internet helps these things.

 

That's a lot of text and talk when it could have simply said that Dumaguete needs faster internet. Maybe they should be talking to Smart and Globe about that one.

 

Back to the original topic. Yes the infrastructure needs to be improved by extending it farther out of the cities. The thing is that if the tech fairy waved it's wand and tomorrow it was all fiber optic and Cat 6 LTE you would have about the same speed you have now because the providers are not providing enough bandwidth that they have to buy as blocks. The less blocks of bandwidth they buy, the more money they make. The equipment they have right now can do a lot better than we are seeing.

One night in my apartment outside of Sibulan I got on line and immediately noticed something unusual had happened. I had a 2 MB/s connection on my Globe broadband. Usually I felt favored by the gods if I had 250Kb/s. Not to let this opportunity pass I started downloading some large files and I continued to do so through the night and into the next morning until at 8 am the magic was exhausted and my internet slowed as if cut off by a knife to 36Kb/s. No gradual change as if a change in a natural phenomenon or as if more users were gradually logging on. It was instant. I think someone clocked in at work (or possibly woke up?) and corrected it. I was using pay as you go 5php per 15 minute segment of time. Had I been using the supersurf I would have probably been shut down at the usual 600-800 MB limit they seemed to favor which was why I used the pay as you go which they did not cut off because if they cut me off, I cut them off. I didn't often need a good connection and if I did I could lug my laptop into Duma but I rarely did that. My phone was tablet sized and it was sufficient for e-mail and so forth and I just checked in whenever I was someplace that I could get a good connection. I used it so little that I didn't even bother to get the password in businesses that provided wifi to their customers as I doubt it would have saved me 50php a week. Judging from someone else trying to show me something on their phone, my broadband was faster than the establishments wifi anyway.

 

I agree with The Dude. I don't know if he will go as far as I do in saying that the Philippines already has pollution and that they will never be able to solve it if they don't generate enough wealth to pay for the solution. Incinerators that generate electricity are not free.