Fast Pipes, Not Enough of Them

Filipinos love to complain about the internet. I did too. So I went to check if we were right.

We are not, quite. The speed got much better. What did not get better is who has it.

The Speed Part Is Good News

I used Ookla's open data. Ookla runs the speed test most people use. They give away the results in small map squares, about 600 metres across, one row per square per quarter.

In early 2019, a home line here averaged 16.25 Mbps. By late 2025 it was 150.16.

That is a real change. I remember 2019. It was bad.

Phone internet got better too, from 15.54 to 89.45 Mbps. Also good. But look at those two pairs again. In 2019 phone and home were about the same. Now home is far ahead.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Speed is what the ads shout about. There is a quieter number called latency. It is the wait before anything starts moving. Speed is how wide the pipe is. Latency is how long before the water shows up.

Latency is what makes a video call feel broken. It is why your voice arrives late and you both talk at once.

On home lines it dropped from 52.7 milliseconds to 12.4. Four times better.

On phones it went from 55.8 to 28.4. Which sounds fine, until you look at when it happened. Almost all of that was before 2021. Since then the phone number has sat near 29 and stopped moving.

And most of us are on phones. So the number that decides whether a call feels right is the one that stopped getting better, on the thing most people use.

Fast Pipes, Not Enough Of Them

Here is the bit that surprised me.

For every 100 people here, there are 115.3 phone lines. More phone lines than people, because plenty of us carry two SIMs.

For every 100 people, there are 7.14 home internet lines.

That is about 16 phone lines for every one home line.

So when someone plans a service that expects you to sit at a desk with a wired connection, they are planning for a small group. Most of us are on a phone, on a cell tower.

Where We Sit In The Neighbourhood

I compared us with the five other big countries nearby, all in the same year.

For the share of people online, we are 6th out of 6. Last. Malaysia is at 98 out of 100. We are at 67.26.

For home internet lines, we are 5th of 6.

But on speed we are fine. So it is not that our internet is bad. It is that not enough people have it.

Those are two different problems. Faster fibre in Makati does not put a first connection in a house in Sulu.

A Number That Went Backwards

One thing made me stop and check twice.

The share of Filipinos online reads 77.87 in 2023, then 67.26 in 2024. It went down by ten points in one year.

Nobody lost their internet. The people asking the question changed how they asked it.

So I did not join those two dots with a line. A line there would draw a crash that never happened to anybody. I drew the 2024 number as its own separate dot and said why.

What I Am Not Telling You

These speeds come from people running a speed test. That is not a random sample of the country.

Think about when you last ran one. Something felt slow, or you had just been upgraded. Both of those pull the number around.

There is a second catch. A map square only exists if somebody tested inside it. Phone squares dropped from about 72,000 at their busiest to under 49,000 now. Fewer places measured. So part of that rising phone line is fewer, different places being checked, not everyone getting faster.

I am still showing the numbers. They are the best open ones there are. I just do not want to hand you a clean line and let you think it is the whole country.

What I Took Off

The old page had charts for social media use, what phones people own, telco market share, and 5G coverage.

None of that came from anywhere I could check. So I took it off, and wrote down where you would have to go to get it properly.