NTC To Enforce Advertised Bandwidth Minimums–Best. God. Damn. News. Ever.

July 24 13:31 2011 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

NTC = WIN

Wouldn’t it be nice if ISPs and telcos wouldn’t lie to us and tell us we that we get XX number of MBPS, but then we get it installed in our homes and we can’t get a measly 1MBPS even on a good day? That would be so awesome, right? If ever there was, like, a government appointed regulatory agency providing an environment that ensures reliable, affordable and viable infrastructure and services in information and communications technology (ICT) accessible to all, wouldn’t that be just off the chain? And what if said regulatory body actually clamped down and told those evil ISPs where to stuff their maximum speed ratings and tell us what they could guarantee instead of dangling a fake number that nobody really gets except rigged speed tests? That would be epic, wouldn’t it? Well dudes, somebody up there in that giant pot cloud in the sky was listening. The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) is now circulating a Memorandum Offer to enforce data speed minimums in all their ads, flyers, etc., and a minimum reliability of 80% must also be attained with that speed in a month. Yep dudes, it actually happened.

Memorandum Order No. 07-07-2011 states that telecommunications companies must specify minimum broadband speeds, rates and reliability in all advertisements, flyers, brochures and service agreements. In addition, the NTC also locked down on the minimum reliability for this declared speed – it must be 80 percent or higher. Numbers that you get from these would be amazingly helpful in finding the most stable and most efficient internet service – with the minimum guarantee that it will be working at that speed 80% of the time at the very least.

Up to this point, all ISP’s have adopted the “advertised maximum” kind of false marketing that we’re pretty much sick of. These generally give you a lofty high maximum of your capable plan, but in most cases you rarely reach. Worse, getting higher paid plans can give you a bigger max, but won’t deliver either. An ISP’s reliability with speeds and caps are information you can’t find easily – you really need to dig down into some technical forums and knowledgeable inputs from individuals to see which ISPs are lying through their teeth, or is one that can deliver strong performance.

We kind of miss the olden days when the first few ISP’s gave you guaranteed rates. These guys take the time to save you a spot on the bandwidth pipe for a dedicated stream. Of course, sooner or later, they had to adopt a more dynamic sharing of the pipe (and upgraded the speeds a few notches), but we hate to see the reliability go. This new NTC memorandum is set to bring back a sense of that security – at least at a minimum of 80%. With this new ruling, we’ll no doubt see some ISPs get torn to shreds for their sub-par performances. And while we’ve never fallen victim to a really horrible ISP yet, lack of knowledge of reliable rates prevented us from giving others a try. Hopefully after this takes effect, we’ll never have these problems again – unless we somehow forget to read the fine print.

Additionally, we hope this overturns any possible hard or soft caps already in place for ISPs. At it stands, most unlimited providers have soft caps that downgrade your speed when you use up a set amount of data for a certain period. However if they have to maintain a minimum speed 80% of the time, it should be safe to assume that they can’t throttle you down during that. This should theoretically disable a soft cap – unless they circumvent this by “fair use” clauses, of course. (We hope not.) Indeed, ISPs can fight back on these rules as well. They could easily just bump down the maximum speeds to equal the now-required minimums or just sit slightly above them. This lets them off the hook with the NTC, but effectively leaves us with much slower speeds. Hopefully, visibly telling your consumers that you’re bracketing down your performance is a major precedent to drop the ISP for another. You know, that’s the reason why competition exists.

In any case, these new rules will take effect 15 days after it gets published in a newspaper of wide circulation. And as for us, we can’t wait to see those numbers. Can you?

Sources: DabawPinoy.com & Technoodling.net (Sadly NTC.gov.ph is down right now, preventing full epic win status.)