Group Calls for Government to Speed up Issuances of Telco Towers, Infrastructure

According to an advocacy group, the government should speed up the issuance of rules covering the guidelines on establishing internet infrastructure and telecommunication towers to keep up with the digital transformation of the country.

Orlando Oxales, co-convenor of CitizenWatch Philippines has stated that “Two joint memorandum circulars have enabled us to achieve respectable progress in the past two years. But these JMCs will expire in July 2023, and we cannot afford to lose momentum in our pursuit of greater connectivity and digital transformation,”

“In just a span of 18 months, the results of the JMCs became evident. They were able to significantly improve the processing time to secure permits: for telco towers from eight months to 16 days, and for other internet infrastructure from 2.5 years to just 2.5 months.”

According to Oxales, the JMCs reduced the number of permits from 13 to eight, and the number of required documents from 86 to 35.

“Telco coverage substantially improved. A total of 7,000 towers were erected in just a span of 18 months, bringing the total number to 29,700 from 22,700,”

Oxales adds that with the JMCs, the Philippines was able to improve its global ranking from 71st to 45th for fixed broadband speed last November 2022. Aside from this, the ranking for mobile internet speed likewise improved from 93rd to 80th back in November 2022.

“The direct results of the JMCs are undisputable,” says Oxales. “This shows we only needed to do things more efficiently in order to see a drastic improvement.”

Source: Philstar