Globe updates Fair Usage Policy, now throttles broadband to 256kbps | Hungry Geeks | Latest news

Internet has been relatively slow in the Philippines compared to other nations like Singapore, Taiwan, and China. It seems that our situation is about to get worse as Globe has updated their Fair Usage Policy (FUP) to throttle down their broadband services from 30% of the service to only 256kbps.

There was no prior notice to existing customers before this change in Globe’s Fair Usage Policy. Previously, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) has set the minimum broadband speed to 256kbps. It seems that a change in the definition of Internet speeds is direly needed in the Philippines.

This is from Globe’s previous FUP policy of throttling down to 30% of your subscribed speeds. For us having 5Mbps, the usual FUP speed is around 1.5mbp which is still tolerable but today’s generation of the internet doesn’t even justify 256kbps. To clear it out, this affects DSL/ADSL and Wireless LTE subscribers while Fiber customers are not.

Seems Globe is looking for ways to you to upgrade to Fiber technology, but their rollout is very slow and is not even available in our area in San Mateo.

According the Globe, the Fair Usage Policy was implemented to reduce speeds of users that are responsible for generating large volumes of traffic on the network, which greatly impacts the service that the company offers to other customers. The telco says that this only affects 3% of users. In our opinion, it seems that this is only a band-aid solution to larger problem. If the network traffic is so bad that the network is overloaded, it would be a better solution to build additional infrastructure to support the network load instead of throttling the speed of paying customers.

Perhaps this sudden change has something to do with the broken subsea cable in Hong Kong that has been affecting Internet speeds in the country.

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Franklin Garcia

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