Philippines to Roll Out Nationwide Free Wi-Fi Service by 2016 | Hacker News Reader

Philippines to Roll Out Nationwide Free Wi-Fi Service by 2016

bloomberg.com

70 pointsprostoalex53 comments

Peru announced that all its poorest residents would be hooked up to full solar power. In the end, a huge amount of money was spent and a couple hundred houses were hooked up to very low wattage systems shared by entire villages.

India announced they were going to produce a $15 computer for the masses of poor. Well we now have $15 computers, but not from this program, and India still is lacking stable electricity, clean water, and other basics throughout much of the nation.

"The Philippines is planning free Wi-Fi services to half of its towns and cities this year and nationwide coverage by end-2016"

So the claim being made is half the towns and cities by this year, 2015, within a few months. And total coverage by next year.

Most of the land area of the Philippines is remote and rural. Much is mountainous. It would be a remarkable engineering project to have total wifi coverage through the entire country by 2016. Accomplishing it with $32 million in funding would be especially amazing.

The chance that this will happen I estimate at 0%. The chance of a modest amount of coverage in certain neighborhoods of larger cities is good. Total coverage by next year isn't going to happen, isn't going to ever happen for the cited price, and the data point that it is being claimed it will happen by next year shows that those in charge of this program don't understand the problem, which means that the actually doable claims (coverage for 50% of all towns and cities by December 2015) are questionable as well.

To be honest I would propose even simpler approach: offer free high speed Wi-Fi in every library. Connect every library in the country to high speed fiber and make libraries relevant in digital world again. Since libraries are usually spread evenly around the country I believe this would serve better purpose than setting unrealistic targets.

You don't have a network of free public libraries in the Philippines...

There are, however, a lot of churches. :)

Well, at least in India there aren't tons of public libraries, so I don't think it should be only libraries.

Obviously libraries would be a starting point. Then connecting schools and public spaces would be next. You need to start somewhere.

That is exactly the plan here, its not free wifi coverage everywhere, its free coverage near schools, libraries, public buildings. Anywhere a dsl connection can be routed to. Note also that 2016 is an election year, many many wild ass claims are being made. I live in the philippines.

How about high speed WiFi in the jungles? Animals could carry WiFi transmitters that could also be powered from the animals movement...

WifiCat

Not only would it be a remarkable engineering feat, but just getting this through the institutionalized government corruption with enough money left over to finish the project would be the largest hurdle.

I'm also incredibly skeptical of this.

Another little issue: the country is made up of over 7100 islands.

So 7,100 wifi APs then? Simples ;)

Just skimmed, TLDR, the article and IDC links is slim on the technical details. The DOST arm of the gov't has a little more detailed doc here: http://icto.dost.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Free-Wi-F...

The doc details that coverage is limited to public places (gov offices, schools, libraries, etc), and aimed towards underserved users. Data cap is measly 1GB per month per device ID, unless you have Gov't passport/ID (up to 3GB/mo); where a national-ID system required here means a decrease in privacy and increased surveillance possibility. One can also smell a strong possibility of this being backed a foreign-state.

"The new service is expected to push data charges lower in the Philippines. Access to the Internet costs about $18 a megabit per second in the country, more than three times the global average of $5, according to research firm International Data Corp. or IDC."

I don't think this will happen considering PLDT owns all the infrastructure:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Philippines/comments/2aurzq/how_pld...

Free ubiquitous Wi-Fi would be an effective tool for tracking citizens' internet habits and physical locations.

There are Swedish cities tracking citizens using mac tracking technology already. Vasteras comes to mind.

https://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=... http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.606293/svenska-tekniken-som-spara...

The company makes the usual claim that because they hash your MAC address that your privacy is assured.

Of course if you have the database and someone's MAC all you have to do is hash it and look it up.

And that's why the world needs to switch to HTTPS.

HTTPS has no bearing on the ability to track traffic volume, sites visited (DNS), and device location (mac address).

Correct. It's still better than nothing I guess.

HTTPS wouldn't necessarily help with this. You can track on the station's MAC address, rather than the content of their HTTP connections.

> The free Internet service will cost the government about 1.5 billion pesos ($32 million) a year and will be available in areas such as public schools, hospitals, airports and parks, said Monchito Ibrahim, deputy executive director of the Information and Communications Technology Office.

It's not free. It's subsidized.

This is the same debate I have with neighbors that want free wifi in the city. Sure. Do you want higher property taxes, too?

It's not free. It's subsidized.

Nothing is free, if that's your point of view.

I think everybody understands that the term 'free' in contexts like this means 'free at the point of use'. Quibbling over it seems a little pedantic.

If it means better services for me and the people around me, yes, give me higher property taxes.

Being terrified of taxes is just peculiar - it's certainly not an argument-winning trump card.

It isn't being terrified of taxes. It is saying "things have a cost. Lets start talking about the cost and asking if we're really willing to pay it."

It's not actually saying "let's start talking about the cost". "Do you want higher taxes?" is a rhetorical statement that means "this is bad, because it will raise our taxes, which I think is inherently bad"; there's no real interest in a genuine discussion of the pros and cons.

The con is it's very difficult to get a government to lower taxes, not so difficult to have them increase it. Also that thing P.J. O'rourke said: giving money and power to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

I'm not aware of having met anyone who has ever said "I want to pay more tax", but I've met plenty of people who have said "that other group of people should pay more tax".

> The con is it's very difficult to get a government to lower taxes

This isn't true at all. It's very difficult to get a government to decrease the services it provides. If you decrease taxes without decreasing provided services, then that would be extremely easy to do -- until you run out of money. Look at the cluster fuck that is Kansas.

> I'm not aware of having met anyone who has ever said "I want to pay more tax"

In that case, you must either not live in the US or else live in a place with either really shit or really parasitic public schools. A huge percentage of school districts are majority funded by local (not state) tax dollars, at rates that are approved directly (i.e., by ballot measure).

Schools are the most obvious case because increases in (local) taxes that fund schools are typically ballot measures, and usually affect the population in a pretty homogenous way (except in very urban areas, but even then, property owners are usually a key voting block in local elections). But there are other taxes that a lot of people support increasing and would end up paying -- gas tax, alcohol tax, etc.

If you've really never met someone who said "I want to pay more taxes", then that's really just an indication that you're living in a bubble. It's not at all an uncommon sentiment. In fact, I'd say that "some of the taxes I pay could be higher if it's spent on the right things" is a far more common sentiment than "taxes bad, period".

Thanks for the reply. You're quite right, bit of a bubble here in Launceston, Tasmania. Population of about 100,000and relatively benign government.

I'm not afraid of taxes. I'm pointing out the cost.

And it's about focus. I live in Vancouver. The city should probably be focusing on the downtown eastside and on transit. In SF, the city should probably focus on Muni/BART and the Tenderloin. It's a matter of focus.

It's about competency. The city's website and mobile Apps are not very good. The coffee shops in my neighborhood can't get wifi right. I don't have confidence in the city being able to deliver wifi better than that.

Cost. Focus. Competence.

Yawn... go to Philippines... their international bandwidth sucks. Wifi will change nothing.

Sad, but true. The timing is curious, next year (2016) is an election year.

I get 2-3 megabits into most international sites on my 10 megabit line, im in manila. Not amazing, but not that bad. They are just rolling out 20mb - 40mb fibre.

The only major issue i have is that PLDT's dns is shit, so i have to reroute everything to google dns.

Hey, off topic but are you based in Manilla? I'm headed there soon, would love to chat! (no contact info in your hn profile)

If you find out where engineers can work remote in the RP with acceptable up/down speeds, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

There are a few co-working spaces around Makati in Metro Manila and a few in Cebu. These are probably also the only areas where you will be able to find decent internet connection speeds.

Also OT: I'm a student from Germany who studied in the Philippines for a while. I'm always interested to go back for a few months. If you have an office in PH and looking for motivated developers, don't hesitate to contact me.

Thanks; there's also "Negros First CyberCentre" in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental: http://www.negros-occ.gov.ph/current-events/press-release/ph...

It would be great if it were possible to rent office space there, assuming you could get decent up/down speeds. Bacolod City is a nice jumping-off spot for the rest of the Visayas (and things like island-hopping and scuba diving).

If you are looking for a jumping-off spot for the Visayas, Metro Cebu is the place to go. It is a hub for the Philippine Nautical Highway and has the 2nd largest airport in the country, with cheap flights to everywhere in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

Cebu is also good. Easy to get from there to Palawan, Dumaguete City, Bohol, Negros, Guimaras, etc.

yep, exactly!

Is Facebook paying for this behind-the-scenes? (There might be some precedent for that.)

This is my fear. A "walled garden" internet is certainly an improvement, but I'm not sure its worth it at the cost of massive corporate surveillance and ubiquitous marketing.

On a higher level, this free Internet is a severe violation of net neutrality.

See India companies withdrawing from their Internet.org idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9382933

Maybe. But my first thought was the opposite, i.e. does the government _not_ want Facebook to provide free Internet for some reason?

You can already use Facebook for free on mobile. I don't think FB has big interest in providing free internet for everyone.

It appears their interest lies in:

(a) having a competitive advantage in raw, large-scaled _metrics_ that Google does not have (see also: Facebook's emotion and behavioral studies[0])

(b) Being able to monetize their advertising platform better. They are well aware that their current numbers are blown up by fake likes, and clickfarms [1]

At least this is just my take. I'm sure there are also other interests behind the scenes.

[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinker...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3k27mv/facebook_is_p...

the US government should do that too... to make it easier to do mass surveillance without having to go through hoops ...

I think in light of the Snowden revelations, everyone in the U.S. would be right to be suspicious of such an offering. Except of course those that have nothing to hide. Of course, if you're not using the nation's free wifi, then you're clearly up to no good and deserve a warrant for suspicious behaviour ;)

If your threat model includes a well funded government then it doesn't matter what wifi network you use.

At this point, everyone's threat model should include a well funded government. Of course, like everything else, you have to weigh convenience against the cost of security. At some point you have to throw your hands up in the air and say "whatever!" if they want to find something against me, they will surely find it. I think it was Cardinal Richeleu who was supposed to have said "Find me 6 lines by the most honest man and I will find in them something to have him hanged." [I paraphrase]

The point is that moving away from free government provided WIFI does nothing to prevent the US government from getting anything they want, and it is dangerous and irresponsible to suggest otherwise. We know this because the US doesn't have government provided WIFI and they have an estimated 3 to 12 exabytes of planned storage at the Utah Data Center. (Where 5 exabytes would be "all the words ever spoken by humans").

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. I can't think of an easier way to monitor everything that's going on online than have every one of your citizens use your wifi access points...

That's such a glib saying that has no relevance here. You're not paying to visit the park - you are the product. You're not paying to use the local library - you are the product. Oh wait you are. That's what taxes are used for.

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