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BY IKE SEÑERES
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I REMEMBER that more than 15 years ago, I was already involved in the discussions about the Philippine Information Infrastructure (PII). At that time, I was the director of the Management information Services Division (MISD) of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and in that capacity; I was also the representative of the DFA to the then National Information Technology Council (NITC).
As director of MISD, I was also the concurrent head of the Code, Radio and Telex (CORATEL) unit of the DFA. Historically, CORATEL was the first unit organized by the DFA after it was established as the first Department of the First Philippine Republic. In that sense, CORATEL was the first communications unit of the Philippine government, very much older than the Signal Corps of the Philippine Army.
During that time that the PII was being discussed, the so called Government Information Structure (GII) was also being discussed, supposedly as a subset of the former. When these two plans were being discussed, I found myself in an awkward position, because most of the government representatives to the NITC supported both the PII and the GII, but I opposed it on the argument that the government should not put up a totally new information infrastructure on top of the existing infrastructure that was already being owned and operated by the private sector.
My position on the issue at the time was premised on my belief that the government should not compete with the private sector, and that the government has no business to be engaged in business.
After my stint at the DFA, I was appointed director general of the National Computer Center (NCC), the precursor of the present day Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT). When I was already with the NCC, discussions about the PII and the GII resurfaced, and again I found myself in an awkward position, because I again opposed it, having again sided with the private sector on the issue.
Fortunately, the Palace at that time was practically silent on the issue, and perhaps because of that, I was not reprimanded for siding with the private sector instead of siding with the government.
After my stint at the NCC, the idea of having a PII again resurfaced, but at that time, it was already rebranded as the National Broadband Network (NBN). Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, I was no longer with the national government at that time and I did not have to oppose it again. As it turned out, the idea for the NBN was tainted with controversies and so it was dropped or postponed, as the case may be.
It seems, however, that the idea for the NBN does not die easy, because it has again resurfaced, no longer called NBN. Nameless as it is as of now, a new round of consultations has been started towards what is now called a National Broadband Plan (NBP).
Technically speaking, the NBP is not exactly the same as the NBN, because the former is just a plan, and the latter is already a network, so to speak. In theory, there is really no plan to revive the NBN as it was originally conceived, but somehow, someway, there could be a new network that will emerge, even if it would not be necessarily called the NBN, again.
Although it might sound like a play of words, there could possibly be a de facto network that could function much like the NBN, without necessarily putting up a totally new information infrastructure on top of the existing infrastructure that is now being owned and operated by the private sector.
I remember that when the PII issue was being discussed in the past, I argued that there is nothing wrong with a network that will be stitched together as a patchwork, especially so if we would build it in a developing country like the Philippines where public funding is rather scarce. Of course, there were no alternative funding mechanisms at that time such as the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) scheme and the Public and Private Partnership (PPP) scheme.
At that time, there was a popular belief that the BOT scheme was not applicable to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects, because it does not have infrastructure components. Eventually however, I was involved in the passport modernization project of the DFA, the first ICT project done under the BOT scheme.
As far as I know, we do not have yet a comprehensive national map that would include all the existing fiber optic assets in our country, regardless of who owns it. As far as I also know, there could be enough existing fiber optic assets in our country that could possibly be stitched into a countrywide broadband network, or at least it could become the core or the backbone of what could be formed as such.
Some might again say that it would just be a patchwork, but then I would again say that there is nothing wrong with a patchwork if it could work for a developing country like ours. Where there is a lack of fiber here and there, the government could always initiate a BOT or a PPP project that could be operated by the private sector, a supplementary network that could work like the toll roads in the physical world.
For that matter, the government could build this supplementary network, just like the way it built the free roads in the physical world. For good measure however, these should be operated by the private sector, under contract with the government./PN
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