A decade of infrastructure upgrades transformed the Philippines from a place where power and internet outages killed remote work into one where teams get 400 Mbps connections and wireless backups. The speaker still recommends planning for occasional outages, but they're no longer the barrier they once were.
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When I started doing this, the Internet went out all the time, as did power outages. In fact, in most places in the Philippines, they used to have, they would call it rolling brownout because the infrastructure of the Philippines couldn't supply enough power for the demand. Same thing with the Internet. It just wasn't very good. In the last 10 years, though, that has really changed a lot. Where I have people on my team that have 400Mbps Internet, which is faster than a lot of people I know in the US the reliability has also improved significantly. And wireless Internet in the Philippines is very common. And so often people will use it as a backup. They'll have a wired Internet connection in their house, and they'll have a prepaid backup plan for if the wired Internet goes down, they have a backup plan. That backup plan typically isn't as fast or as good as the wired one, but at least it keeps them online. So when I started outsourcing to the Philippines, power and Internet outages were a common problem. I rarely see them anymore, but it is something you should be aware of if you're going to outsource there.
