(Continued from yesterday)
WITHOUT any doubt, I could categorically say that faster internet is already available in many parts of our country, except that it has not become cheaper in most parts of the country.
As of now, it could be said that we are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, because it seems that as of now, we could not bring down the prices of internet where it is now faster, and we could not make it faster where it is now cheaper.
Whichever way you would look at this, I could confidently say that the bottom line of this is the law of supply and demand, and the commodity in question is bandwidth or to be more specific, broadband.
Just like all commodities that are affected by the law of supply and demand, the price of the commodities are affected by the human factor, and by that I mean the element of greed in the pricing of the commodities.
For obvious reasons, the engineers of some internet service providers (ISPs) will never admit that internet speed in the Philippines is slower because they do not know how to make it faster.
On the other hand, the managers of these ISPs might argue that they could not make internet cheaper because they still have to recover their investments. That also seems to be the logic of the managers of tollways, who argue that they have to increase toll rates because of the high costs of maintenance.
That logic seems to be flawed, because as it is supposed to be, the costs of utilities are supposed to be going down as these are depreciated over a long period of time. At the very least therefore, we could suspect that there is dishonesty involved in the pricing of tollway rates, fuelled by no other than greed. Suffice it to say that that could be happening as well in the pricing of internet rates.
Although I might sound naive, I am willing to say that the separate efforts to make internet speed in the Philippines become faster and cheaper could actually run parallel to each other, wherein the two goals could possibly converge with each other.
On the technology side, I already know how to make it faster. On the morality side however, I do not know how to make it cheaper, because I could not offer a cure for greed.
Yes, this is a morality issue because if a company does not care for the good of the people, they would not care if they are greedy or not. As it is supposed to be, even a fraction of one percent that is stolen could already be considered as graft.
There was a time when we tolerated graft up to 30 percent, but after that, we already thought it was too much.
Having said that, what should be considered tolerable profits for the ISPs and what would be too much? (iseneres@yahoo.com/PN)
