FAITH, HOPE & CHARITY

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[av_heading heading=’ Going beyond wireless fidelity’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY IKE SEÑERES
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Sunday, March 12, 2017
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IT’S ALREADY good news that the government is going to install wireless fidelity (WIFI) access in barangay halls and other public places, but what is even better news is that the government will now implement a National Broadband Program (NBP) along with a government portal.

To those who are too young to remember, what is now referred to as the NBP is the old plan to put up a Philippine Information Infrastructure (PII), a plan that eventually evolved into what became known as the National Broadband Network (NBN).

Unfortunately however, the plan to put up an NBN was shelved due to allegations of corruption. Fortunately, the government has realized not to throw away the baby along with the bath water, and so we are now back on track with the newly revived plan to put up an NBP.

I recall that about 25 years ago, when I was representing the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) in the National Information Technology Council (NITC) in my capacity as the DFA Director of Management Information Systems (MIS), I opposed the plan to put up the PII, because the plan at that time was to put up a totally new and totally separate government owned information infrastructure, on top of the existing information infrastructure at that time that was owned by the private sector.

My position at that time was that it was wrong for the government to put up an infrastructure that would compete with the private sector, a position that was based on my conviction that the government had no business being in business, and its role was to support private business and not to compete with it.

Many years later, when I was already the Director General of the National Computer Center (NCC), I continued to oppose the plan to put up the PII, a decision that put me in an awkward position, because I always ended up siding with the private sector representatives, instead of siding with my fellow representatives from the government sector.

At that time, however, the speed of the internet was not yet an issue, and because of that, I was always under the impression that to private sector was fully capable of setting up and maintaining good connectivity without any help from the government. I even said that the role of the government at that time was to do nothing, and its only role was to step aside in order not to obstruct what the private sector has to do, in order not to slow it down.

About two years ago however, we started to hear from the private sector that after much analysis, they have concluded that they are not capable of making the internet go faster on their own, and therefore they have started to welcome any help or assistance that the government could provide. That was the paradigm shift that I was waiting for, and thereafter, I changed my position and I started to say in my writings that the government should now put up its own infrastructure that would not only meet its own connectivity needs, but would also supplement what the private sector has to offer, so that in the overall, it would be the people who would benefit from the combined infrastructure.

In several newspaper columns, I wrote that the information superhighways should be handled just like the way we are now handling our physical superhighways wherein anyone could use the public highways for free, but anyone using the tollways would have to pay.

I also wrote that in case the private sector would want to use the information infrastructure of the government, it would have to pay as if it is a tollway, in much the same way that the government is now paying for the use of the information infrastructure of the private sector. I am happy to note that this would apparently be the business model of the NBP.

Even if the NBP and the WIFI connections are two separate projects, they could actually complement each other, because the NBN could now be the backbone that would support the last miles that would go into the barangay halls and the other public places.

Little is known yet about the government portal project, but it would most likely host the content that would be carried by the infrastructure. Of course, the barangay halls may choose to have their own websites, in which case, beyond the WIFI connections, they would also need domain name hosting, web designs and software licenses, among other needs. It would be such a waste for them not to have their own web presence, because sooner or later, the internet in our country will become faster, hopefully that is./PN

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