Bottleneck requirments caused telcos’ failure

By LITO RULONA,
Correspondent

Telecommunication companies failed to reach the scale of good number of cell sites to standard subscriber ratio because of bottleneck requirements set by the city government.

This was disclosed by City Councilor Edna Dahino, chairman of the Committee on Women’s and Finance Division as she called to review the pertinent provisions of the City Ordinance Number 9119-2004 for the purpose of streamlining and for a well-focused but minimal intervention in line with the city’s initiative of ease in doing business.

Dahino’s move is now referred to the Committee of Public Utilities chaired by City Councilor Teodulfo Lao, Jr. for immediate action to be made.

Dahino’s call came after city council committee on trade and commerce headed by Councilor George S. Goking during its meeting last week tackled complaints of subscribers on slow internet connection in the city.

The councilor said it was observed that these providers have failed to properly address this concern even as they are good in collecting the payment for their services. With this prevailing situation, these telecommunication companies may face suspension of their business permits, Goking said.

During the meeting, the chair also expressed his disappointment that some firms only sent representatives to answer queries, but failed to present valid reasons for the poor service.

He is pushing for a resolution recommending to the city mayor the suspension of the business permits of these firms if no improvement of services will be rendered to the users.

In reaction to this, a representative from PLDT pointed out that the poor connection is the result of too many subscribers or users using only a single MBPS resulting in congestion and a sluggish internet speed.

The NTC representative admitted that this problem is not only present in the city but all over the country. This is mainly due to the failures of the firms to implement infrastructure projects such as cell sites.

He said that as of now there are only 20 thousand cell sites constructed out of the needed 67 thousand that will fully address the issue on internet connection in the country.

He said the government is also to be blamed for this because of the long list of requirements imposed on them before they can be granted permits to construct the cell sites in compliance to the local government code and RA 7925 or “An act to promote and govern the development of Philippine telecommunications and the delivery of public telecommunications services.”

Dahino also gave a special report on this last regular session, said that it is now the right time for the City Council to review and maybe revise the said law, if needed, so that the companies could resolve the problem properly.

“It was revealed that their existing telecommunications network infrastructure is inadequate to meet the requirements of a fast growing city like ours, the Cagayan de Oro,” she said.

During the meeting, telecommunications representatives admitted that they have many pending construction of cell site projects and accordingly additional similar projects are up for implementation which is expected to significantly improve their services but what is stifling their expansion of infrastructure like cell sites is the bottlenecks in the permitting process set by the city government, she pointed out.