John Jonas tracks how Philippine internet speeds have jumped from 256 kbps to 70 Mbps wired and 21 Mbps mobile, opening outsourcing beyond Manila. Starlink just got approved there. Faster speeds mean more people can work from anywhere, not just the capital.
Questions this episode answers
About 256 kbps (kilobits per second).
5 Mbps (megabits per second).
About 21 Mbps.
About 70 Mbps.
Starlink (Elon Musk's satellite Internet).
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 196, Internet speeds in the Philippines. So when I first started outsourcing the Philippines, their Internet wasn't really good. So like 256kbps was pretty common. And yeah, that's a K, not an M, so not megabits per second. Those are kilobits per second. Five megabits per second was really fast. And just so you have an idea, at my house I have gigabit Internet and. And that's like 4,000 times faster than kilobits per second, I think. I think that's like the actual number, 4,000 times faster. And for a lot of years the Philippines had a reputation in Asia as being like the slowest Internet. But now that has definitely changed and the Internet in the Philippines is significantly better. And actually it's really quite good in a lot of places. So let me tell you about jam. I have an OFS JAM who recently sent me a picture of his workstation. And in the picture he's still masked, he has a mask on because the Philippines is still under a mask mandate. As I record this, just so you know. But he sent me a picture of his work setup and I know that he drives his daughter to work to school and her school is, I don't know, an hour or two hours away. It's something, it's a long ways. And so he drives and then he sits there and works while, while she's in school and then he brings her back home. And so he sent me a picture of his workstation which is out of the back of his car. And he has his laptop and he has a fan there and that's where he's working. And it works for him. He's on mobile data and the mobile data works really well. And so I thought like, oh, this is an interesting situation. I thought it was odd. And so I started asking and only come to find out this isn't all that uncommon. People in the Philippines are often working outside of their home using mobile Internet. And so I found like some of my developers are doing it now. Obviously this doesn't work for everybody. In rural, super rural areas, mobile Internet still isn't that good. Or certain positions. Like my, my video editor deals with really big files and so he's not working on mobile data very often. But he's. His Internet speed is really good to the point where like I'll record in 4K with really big files, 4 gigabyte files, and he has no problem with them. So the trend in the Philippines is really, really good. The average download speed right now is 21Mbps. And that' mobile data. On broadband data, like wired into your house. Their average download Speed is about 70Mbps. So 70, you know, it's respectable. It's. It's not like my gigabit, but it's, it's still pretty fast and every few months we're seeing it improve. Plus starlink Elon Musk's satellite Internet was just approved in the Philippines. So that'll start showing up and increasing speeds everywhere, including in rural locations. Which means for you, like, I often get emails from people saying, hey, where can I hire someone that has the best Internet? And in the past, that was always Manila. Now that's not really the case anymore. You don't have to just hire from Manila to have someone with reliable Internet. You can hire from anywhere, which means you have a wider pool of people who you can hire, which is really, really awesome. Finding a great ofs doesn't have to be painful or tedious or difficult or long. It shouldn't take you very long. And that's why I created one vaoa to take the guesswork out of the process of hiring someone so that you can hire someone quickly, efficiently, easily, and find someone every time. 1vaoa. 1vaoa.com.
