Globe and PLDT has made yet another huge announcement last Thursday when they both agreed on a bilateral domestic IP peering. This is less than a month after their joint acquisition of the telco business of San Miguel and the immediate use of the 700MHz frequency to improve mobile internet.
The discussion on a local peering agreement between the two biggest telcos in the country has been on the table for about a decade already. There has been resistance on either of the two but recent developments in the political climate and the mounting pressure to provide faster and more reliable internet service has prompted the two to work faster.
To regular subscribers, the term IP Peering may seem too technical so for the purpose of this article, let’s plainly explain it as a direct connection between the two networks of both telcos. It’s like opening the C5 road via Mindanao Avenue to traffic from NLEX to SLEX instead of going the old usual route which is longer (via Balintawak -> Mayon -> Espana -> Lacson – Quirino -> SLEX).
So how will this domestic IP peering really help make the internet faster? We give you three examples:
1. Online Gaming. If you play one of those online gaming that’s either exclusively hosted on Globe and PLDT, your response time (latency) will significantly improve. This is because the request from your PC client to the game server will have a shorter route. What would have been a 300ms latency will now be reduced to between 30-90ms. This means fewer to no lags, reduces risk of disconnection and better over-all gaming experience.
You can check this by loading SpeedTest.net in your browser and manually selecting the server of both Globe and PLDT and check if the Ping results are almost similar between the two.
2. Browsing Locally-Hosted Websites. There are not a lot of popular websites that are hosted domestically but those that are hosted by local data centers of PLDT and Globe would experience better load times. Most likely, government-owned sites like DFA online appointment and passport renewal system, the NBI Online Clearance system and the BIR eFPS would load much faster because they can now be accessed domestically by subscribers on either telcos.
However, internationally hosted sites like CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch or Engadget would not gain any benefit from this.
3. Downloading Torrents. Since each seeder is basically a server hosting local content, other peers in the network that downloads these seeded content will get it faster. This is the same effect you will notice when you are seeding a file in your home network from a PC and another PC or laptop tries to download that same file. Instead of going outside your home network to get it elsewhere, the content is routed within your network and the download speed is significantly faster.
The new arrangement in IP peering could also encourage huge global sites to host their content locally if they generate significant traffic from the country.
Over-all, it will be the online gamers that will significantly feel the improvement while the general internet user might not even feel as much. Still, it’s an arrangement that is long overdue and a step forward, nonetheless.
I think this is good news. Pero I prefer to have the Philippine market for especially on internet services to open to foreign and other ISP providers like Verizon and Telstra. I think this would open a lot of opportunities to upgrade the speeds and services of the ISPs and also decrease the price and downtime of internet.