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High Tech si Inday
My son’s former yaya has a Friendster account!
Out of pure generosity my wife created her account and allowed her to go online from time to time. Our yaya would occasionally upload pictures of her Manila “mall tours” to brag about them to relatives in Negros.
Very recently, we also discovered that our neighbor’s wifi is constantly active during the day, even if family members are not home. It turns out their house help is “burning the wifi connection” to chat with a foreigner boyfriend.
Our current yaya (not as tech savvy as our neighbor’s “domestic chatter”) has set aside huge portions of her salary to buy a refurbished cell phone in Greenhills. And it’s not just one with talk and text features. She got a Nokia 60-something, with a camera and can MMS pictures to relatives in Bicol. They don’t go for anything less than one with iphone features these days.
With the internet and cell phones trickling down to mainstream Philippines, one may think our country is tech savvier than its neighbors? No less than social site Friendster thinks RP is an important market because of a huge number of Filipino users. Who among today’s young people has no Friendster (or Facebook) account, an email address or (at the very least) a cell phone?
But despite the popularity of the internet and cell phones in the Philippines, we still have one of the lowest internet penetration rates in Asia and the world.
Budde.com in its 2000 industry data shows other Asian countries have a higher internet penetration than the Philippines (Internet usage and broadband subscriptions are the bases for determining internet penetration). Korea leads the pack (71%) followed by Hong Kong (70%), Japan (69%) and Singapore (61%).
The Philippines (5%) sits (embarrassingly at bottom of list) between Bhutan (also 5%) and Sri Lanka (4%).
But with the aggressive expansion of internet and telecommunications infrastructure that ranking had changed dramatically in just a few years. Yahoo in its 2007 study says penetration rate in the Philippines reached 14%, or more than 13 million of the total population of 96 million.
In 2009, research group Nielsen pegged the number of internet users in the Philippines at 24 million, and it is expected to rise to 30 million by 2012. That may be better but still quite low. In other developing countries, close to half of the population is already using the internet regularly.
Aside from upgraded infrastructure, ad campaigns on internet use are creating new markets. Bayantel’s “Lola Techie ads” for instance, is reaching out to senior citizens telling them it’s not too late to be tech savvy. A Nielsen study shows 80% of internet users in the Philippines are between 10 to 39 years old. A largely untapped market (the 40 and above) are also the age group that can afford to spend on PC’s or internet subscriptions.
The price of personal computers and laptops also affects internet penetration. That’s why telecommunications companies such as Globe, PLTD and Smart offer attractive internet package sometimes with “free” personal computers in exchange for broadband or DSL subscriptions.
But despite all these, the internet is not penetrating as deep as it should. The biggest obstacle still, is the price of the service.
Research group BSBC Hook UAI says most Philippine Internet Service Providers have connections through backbones in the United States. This is why internet rates here are still 80% more expensive than internet rates in the US. Filipinos, especially the mainstream may be interested in exploring the internet (the way they conquered texting and cell phones) but simply put, the service is still unaffordable. In other countries the internet is in line with basic utilities electricity and water.
Nielsen Philippines Director for Client Service Eric Barrera still forsees a lopsided penetration with internet users mainly in big cities where Telcos have expanded rabidly. Very little has been done to improve infrastructure in rural areas, where the people still depend on internet café’s for their online needs.
This is perhaps why our former yaya did not become as hooked to the internet as I would have expected. Her relatives in the province really had no way of viewing those Friendster pics.