Professional Documents
Culture Documents
FROM:
http://www.pwdo.org
http://www.gdap.org.ph
http://www.igdamanila.org
http://www.phlashers.com
http://www.pifa.ph
TO:
Sen. Paolo Benigno Aquino IV
Chair
Senate Committee on Trade,
Commerce and Entrepreneurship
Hon. Geronimo L. Sy
Assistant Secretary, Office for Competition
Department of Justice
Padre Faura Street, Ermita, Manila
SUBJECT:
Table of Contents
I. Minimum Broadband Speeds
II. Fair Use Policy and Bandwidth Caps
III. Net Neutrality
IV. Official NTC Broadband Measurement Tool
A. Measurement Contact Points
B. Consumer Measuring Tool
C. Public Results
D. Ping or Latency as a Primary Metric Independent from Volume Transfer
E. Packet Loss as a Primary Metric Independent from Volume Transfer
V. Lock-in Periods
Annex
The NTC, DOJ and DTI also need to recognize that the Internet landscape of 2015 is a far cry from
the Internet landscape of 2003. In 2003, the average webpage size was 100-300 KiloBytes (KB).
Today, webpages average about 1-3 MegaBytes (MB), which is an increase by a factor of 10. Surfing
websites today at 256Kbps (32 KB/s) is akin to surfing on dial-up in the 90s with slow loading pages,
content and images, hardly a broadband experience.
As such, we need to appropriately define broadband speeds in today's context. It is unfair of telcos
and ISPs to advertise products such as 4G wireless broadband or DSL broadband if they can only
deliver 2G speeds (256Kbps) and can hardly provide a broadband experience.
II. Fair Use Policy and Bandwidth Caps
Today, local ISPs are also implementing what they call Fair Use Policies, which are meant to curb
behavior by so-called abusive users. Their definition of this abuse for the most part pointed towards
the use of bittorrent file sharing technology to engage in copyright infringement and piracy of digital
media such as movies, software and music, with claims that 5 to 10 percent of abusive users
consume 80 percent of their networks' available bandwidth.
While it is acknowledged that there is bittorrenting that comprise questionable user activity, what our
groups find unacceptable is that normal, lawful usage of Internet services has now been re-classified
by telcos and ISPs as abusive simply because these consume bandwidth considered to be heavy
back in 2003, such as watching of Video on Demand. There is a large disconnect between the ISPs in
the Philippines with regard to its views of the Internet and the reality of the Internet today normal,
lawful, ordinary Internet content is now much heavier (by up to a factor of 10 and higher) when
compared to over a decade ago.
For example, in their Fair Use Policies (FUPs) which places bandwidth caps on users, Globe states:
http://www.globe.com.ph/help/data/fup
Q: I'm a Prepaid user. What can I do with 800MB per day?
A: With this capacity, you can view 2,720 web pages ...view 272 minutes of streaming
video ...and download one 90-minute movie.
http://tattoo.globe.com.ph/fup
Q: What net activities can I do with a usage allowance of 1GB? Don't you think that bandwidth
is too low?
A: There are lots of online activities you can do with 1 GB! You can:
Browse up to 10,486 web pages (100 Kb web page)
1 movie (700 MB video file)
800MB (819200KB) / 2,720 is roughly equal to 300KB. As stated above, common web pages weigh an
average of 1MB to 3MB today.
The Honorable Lady and Gentlemen can have their staff check these for themselves by using the
Google Chrome web browser on desktop, opening up the Network Monitoring Tool as shown below by
pressing CTRL-SHIFT-J, and clicking on the Network tab, then pressing SHIFT-RELOAD upon
visiting a webpage to do a clean load to the browser cache. The total download size of a loaded
webpage will be viewable at the bottom of the Network panel.
The following is a list of sample common web pages (front page of website), both international and
local, along with their respective sample download sizes:
International:
Facebook (logged in) - http://facebook.com 2.7MB
Yahoo! - http://yahoo.com 1.3MB
CNN - http://cnn.com 2.6MB
The New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com 2.8MB
Discovery Channel - http://www.discovery.com - 3.3MB
National Geographic - http://www.nationalgeographic.com 3.8MB
WIRED Magazine - http://www.wired.com 3.6MB
Local:
Even the front web pages of the websites of the telcos, ISPs and affiliated brands themselves weigh
much larger than their outdated claims:
With regards to Internet video such as streaming, Video on Demand (VoD) and downloads, normal
video clips from the streaming service YouTube can take as much as 12MB per minute. This is
contrary to the FUP stated above, as 272 minutes of streaming video can consume 2.7GB to
3.2GB in reality.
Video as of today is one of the most bandwidth-intensive applications on the Internet. As of November
of 2014, during peak hours, the American video streaming service Netflix (http://netflix.com) was
already estimated to consume 50% of Internet bandwidth in the USA
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/11/24/netflix-and-youtube-now-consume-50-ofthe-Internet-as-the-argument-for-net-neutrality-weakens/).
The partnership and launching of different telcos and ISPs of their own eat all you can Video on
Demand offerings such as Sky Broadband's iWanTV! (http://iwantv.com.ph), Globe Telecom's
HOOQ (https://www.hooq.tv/ph), and PLDT's iFlix (https://iflix.com) is an implicit statement by our
local ISPs that this level of heavy bandwidth consumption is not abusive use.
This tacit approval of heavy bandwidth usage by telcos and ISPs via their own VoD services is wanting
to have their cake and eat it too they are looking to double-charge consumers by encouraging heavy
bandwidth use and at the same time, putting stiff bandwidth caps and charges for purchasing
additional data should the already too low daily and monthly caps be breached.
In addition, there is the problem of telcos and ISPs throttling the speeds of prepaid and unlimited
Internet users once they have reached their bandwidth caps. This wouldn't be as big as a problem
except that they are throttling users to the low end of 2G at 256kbps, the equivalent of dial-up today.
When telcos are advertising claims of 4G and LTE speeds. If users pay the going rate of P5 for every
15 minutes of advertised 4G speeds, users should receive 15 minutes of broadband speeds, not
speeds at which they cannot access Internet services properly.
Aside from these daily and monthly caps, these ISPs have a policy of throttling the speeds of users
once their FUP bandwidth cap has been reached. The problem with this is that the throttled speed is
much too low, 256kbps.
For law-abiding citizens who do not engage in software piracy, this is a large problem because in our
currently fraught cyber-security landscape, original and legal software and operating systems such as
Windows, Mac OSX and Linux must often patch via the Internet in order to fix security vulnerabilities
that may leave users vulnerable to cyber-attacks, or to simply push out software updates and
improvements. Some purchased original software can also require gigabytes of downloads. These
legal, original software patches and downloads often are many gigabytes in size (sometimes up to
50GB) and the low bandwidth caps and throttled speeds by ISPs and telcos will prevent responsible
law-abiding citizens who pay for software from being able to do so. As pirated software typically is not
patched and are left vulnerable, these low bandwidth caps and fair use policies actually encourage
software piracy instead of lawful use.
For example, in Wi-Tribe's Fair Use Policy page, they say:
http://www.wi-tribe.ph/fair-usage-policy
Q: What can I do to keep my usage on a normal level?
A: To help avoid this happening in future, here are some simple tips that would help manage
your usage.
5. Limit automated software updates.
Your PC/Laptop operating system and other software may have automatic updates turned on,
which means it is using your Internet connection even when you are not aware of it.
Ensure you turn off any automatic updates on software you are using, and only allow
updates that you need.
This policy by Wi-Tribe is completely unacceptable because it leaves users vulnerable to automated
malware attacks and hacking attempts by cyber-criminals. Such a fair use policy is an endangerment
of its own users and is tantamount to telling subscribers please drive with your seat belts off when
using our Internet.
Furthermore, today, students, teachers and ordinary users can enjoy free high quality online learning
from top educators and universities around the world through Video on Demand from groups like
Coursera (http://coursera.org) and Khan Academy (http://khanacademy.org), and many other tutorials
online. These free online courses often require HD video so that the text in the lessons are readable,
and such low bandwidth caps and throttled speeds prevent students and teachers from utilizing them
properly and make our growing Internet-enabled youth population from being more competitive
globally.
The other lawful and fair use activity of users that take up much bandwidth is the ordinary file backups
and file synching via cloud computing. It is not only businesses that use technology, but ordinary
citizens as well, and it has become crucial for convenience and to avoid data loss.
While bandwidth caps and capped throttling are not necessarily unreasonable, these low caps of 13GB and low throttled speeds of 256Kbps are also anti-lawful citizen, anti-education, anti-innovation
and as outlined in our previous examples, simply anti-normal consumer because such heavy
bandwidth use is no longer abuse it is the norm. What is worse is that these sub-standard services
are really expensive compared to abroad. As such, we implore the offices of the NTC, DOJ, DTI and
the Committee on Trade, Commerce and Entrepreneurship of the Senate to look into these practices
of local ISPs and telcos.
III. Net Neutrality
Some of the groups have been receiving reports that local ISPs have been engaging in selective
throttling of traffic from certain online services such as YouTube. This was noted by users who use
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs a kind of Internet tunnelling software); with their VPN off and using
the default ISP connection, they could not stream videos from YouTube without buffering, and yet
when they turned their VPN on, they were able to stream YouTube videos at high definition (HD).
Given the fact that there are many Streaming and VoD services now entering the Philippines, it is
hoped that our local ISPs do not throttle the incoming packets from the other services and only give
businesses they invested in prioritized preferential treatment of traffic (putting them on Internet fast
lanes while putting competitors' data on slow lanes), because this violates the principle of Net
Neutrality and is a form of anti-trust and anti-competition.
This is a complex issue, but it's also important to note that the The Federal Communications
Commission (FCC), the United States equivalent of the NTC, has already passed very strong Net
Neutrality rules: https://www.fcc.gov/document/protecting-and-promoting-open-Internet-nprm
At the end of the day, we need to ensure that there is proper competition between our telcos and ISPs,
or else they will end up lax and we will all end up with poor Internet.
milliseconds missed can mean the difference between a 1 week wait to get an appointment with the
DFA and a 1.5 month wait.
Other content sensitive to latency are Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and realtime video
communications applications, like Skype and Google Hangouts, which millions of Filipinos now use to
stay in touch with their loved ones both abroad and in the province. With poor latency, such
communications can become difficult to use due to the lag.
Other problems encountered when latency is bad is that webpages expire or time out, forcing the
user to reload the page and waste bandwidth, and worse, cause errors in online transactions with
double sends.
In many of these cases, it is not just the volume download rate that matters, but latency: how fast the
user's data packets travel to the server and back it determines how fast web pages load, also a
sticking point for us in the Philippine web design and development industry since it takes more work
for us to produce optimized content for Filipino consumers.
As such, it is our stand that Latency be a standalone metric against which reliability can be measured
because with the applications above, no matter what bandwidth subscription the customer has, if his
latency is terrible, he will not be able to use the Internet that he or she paid for in the way that he
intended.
E. Data Packet Loss as a Primary Metric Independent from Volume Transfer
Again, we reiterate our stand that packet loss be a required metric in the NTC's broadband reliability
measurements, contrary to the positions of the PCTO and PAPTELCO. Furthermore, it is our position
that it also be a standalone metric that is separate from the upstream and downstream volume data
rate that the PCTO is willing to measure. This is because again, depending on usage, if the
applications that the paying customer is using is reliant on no-to-minimal packet loss, volume transfer
rate and even latency may not matter because the user cannot use his applications.
For those who do not know what data packet loss is, in telco analogies, in texting, it is sending text
messages that never arrive to their destination. Or in physical delivery terms, it is sending packages to
someone and the packages never arrive. What then are we paying for when our applications rely upon
our data packets reaching their destinations and for client/server messages to get back in a timely
manner?
A big example of this is in online gaming. Imagine you are playing chess and your moves never reach
the person you are playing against. In terms of online communications such as chat, voice or video,
they will become choppy and communication will be a problem. Not only may messages not arrive on
time, they might never arrive at all.
This is a problem even with normal webpages in browsers the user can reload a page as many
times as he wants and some pages may never fully load if the user's Internet connection has high
packet loss. This is especially bad when online transactions are involved, as the transactions may
never happen, or worse the user may encounter bad errors and even possibly be double-charged.
Finally, very important to many Filipinos are VoIP and multimedia communications applications. Packet
loss can render these applications with choppy and garbled voice, video, or worst, being completely
unusable. With millions of Filipinos depending on these applications as their lifeline to their loved ones
abroad, it is the duty of Philippine telcos and ISPs to ensure that Filipino consumers get the proper
quality of service that their customers pay for meaning minimal packet loss.
Because of these, packet loss also needs to be a standard separate from volume data transfer rate
and latency. All three are like links in a chain. If a single link in a chain fails, the entire chain fails, that
is why each of the three needs to be measured on their own, and if one of them is considered to be
unreliable, then the entire Internet connection of the user should be considered unreliable and
qualified for bill rebates on the days in which the customer reports sub-standard performance.
V. Lock-In Periods
In previous technical working group meetings, representatives from PCTO have repeatedly expressed
that customers can always leave them if they under-perform, and that it will be the greatest
punishment that a telco or ISP can receive as its bottom line will be hurt.
On the contrary, this is not so because most of the time, consumers are forced into 1 to 3-year lock-in
contracts whenever they sign up with an ISP, so even if they wanted to leave, they cannot because of
expensive early termination fees (ETFs) they must pay if they leave an ISP early.
Our proposal is that an ISP be given three strikes on reported under-performance via a user using the
NTC's official measuring tool, and after three disputes that are not resolved properly, they be freed
from any obligation to pay early termination fees so that they can realistically transfer to a different
provider.
If the customer is not getting what he is paying for, for the purpose he or she intended, then he or she
must be allowed to leave an abusive relationship by misbehaving ISPs under consumer protection
laws.
Annex A.
Ping and Packet Loss Testing
Ping tests can be performed on all three major operating systems as follows:
On Microsoft Windows, go to Start Run then type Command to bring up the terminal.
Type ping WebsiteName.com -t to start the Ping test. Press CTRL-C to stop it.
On Apple Mac OSX, press CMD-Space to reveal the program search bar, then type Terminal
to bring it up. Click on Terminal in the search results to start it, then type ping -i 1
WebsiteName.com to start the Ping test. Press CTRL-C to stop.
On Linux, open the Terminal then type ping -i 1 WebsiteName.com. Press CTRL-C to stop.
Packet Loss can be measured via Request timed out (RTO) messages during Ping tests, where
each RTO is a lost or dropped data packet.
Original signed
Original signed
_________________________
Sophia Lucero
Co-Founder
Philippine Web Designers Organization
_________________________
Mae Lynn Paulino
Co-Founder
Philippine Web Designers Organization
Orginal signed
_________________________
Alvin Juban
President
Original signed
_________________________
Marnielle Lloyd Estrada
Chairman
Original signed
Original signed
_________________________
John Imbong
Adobe User Group Manager
Philippine Flash ActionScripters
_________________________
Carlos Nazareno
Co-Founder
Philippine Flash ActionScripters
Original signed
_________________________
Nica Dumlao
Steering Committee
Philippine Internet Freedom Alliance
Original signed
_________________________
Atty. Marnie Tonson
Steering Committee
Philippine Internet Freedom Alliance