Internet Access

[Admin]

They certainly don't make it simple to understand in the Philippines on how to manage the Internet, let alone discover if they do broadband. Most sites do not even quote prices!

Although I won't be going the Philippines this year, always good to plan well ahead, and would be looking for somewhere near the beach, new property, outside of Cebu probably. That would give me the flexibilty of travelling North or South, and relatively close to the airport. Also the weather on that island is more stable being protected by those around it. No Tsunamis ;D

[peterdavid]

Keith,

We had broadband when we were living in the Philippines. Considering the usually shambolic mess the country and its services are normally in (including the piss poor land line phones), the broadband (dsl) service wasn't actually that bad. We had it from pldt, it was about 2500 a month for 512kb (ie, about the same as it costs here), and you only needed a 3000 deposit. You need a pldt contract to get it on a landline. Alternatively, you can get dial up straight over your pldt phone line (about 1 peso a minute), and again, surprisingly, you can connect over dial up at about 50kb a minute - almost isdn standards!

The biggest worry was that, like everything else in that country, it seems utterly beyond them to actually secure the wires providing the phone line/dsl, leaving them hanging across the street and thus leaving them vulnerable to any scrounging scrote who wants to come along and cut in/cut you off, etc - although luckily we were never the victim of that (as far as we knew, anyway). Doesn't half make the place look a mess - can't they spend 5 more minutes on the installation at least pretending to try and make the place look tidy??

The dsl was pretty reliable, we got a pretty solid connection most of the time, although pldt couldn't resist indulging itself in a failure to provide the service for 24 hours or so, periodically - normally, they would tell us, due to the fact someone had cut or otherwise intercepted one of their wires that they leave hanging everywhere. And yet still they don't learn..... But even if the dsl went down, we could still access dial up.

Like everything in the philippines, it's a substandard version of what we get here, but as things go over, it's probably about as good as you could hope for in the philippines in terms of service provision. Don't expect anyone to bother answering the customer services number when the dsl goes down though(!) And amazingly, the "engineers" who installed it didn't even try and crack on to the wife when they came, in the misguided belief that I can't understand tagalog. How unusually professional of them :)

So, provided pldt service where you'll be (don't know about their coverage outside manila), I would hesitatingly say it seemed ok when we lived there (although a different area could well be a different story in terms of quality of connection).

[Admin]

Thanks Peter, as they are mobile phone savvy over their, connecting via the network would be a good backup as I do over here. Wonder when they'll get 3G :o

[peterdavid]

Probably about 2046, given current estimates...

[Admin]

Phew!! I thought their would have been a delay ;D