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TELEPHONE companies on Monday leaned on the basic law to
support their contention that it would be
unconstitutional for the government to compel them to
give free short message service (SMS), or text.
Executives of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT),
Digital Telecommunications Philippines Inc. (Digitel)
and Globe Telecom added that offering SMS for free to
the public will only make the situation worse because
they anticipate a deluge of texting (SMS sending) once
it becomes free again, as it was in the beginning.
They
inferentially argued the situation has changed, with
millions of cell phones now in use. “The network cannot
take on the deluge of SMS. It will collapse in less than
an hour. And when the whole network collapses there will
be no more SMS and voice-service offerings. All the
networks of all operators will collapse under the weight
of free SMS,” said PLDT head for regulatory affairs and
policy Ray Espinosa.
The PLDT
group handles roughly a billion SMS traffic a day.
Globe’s networks track 500 million to 700 million text
messages daily while Sun Cellular handles 80 million to
100 million a day.
Espinosa
said the respective franchises of PLDT, Smart
Communications Inc., Pilipino Telephone Corp., and
Connectivity Unlimited Resources Enterprises, Inc. state
that they have the legal authority and right to provide
and charge for SMS.
“These
companies, therefore, are authorized under their
respective franchises to provide SMS as a commercial
service. This is also very clear under the respective
certificates of public convenience and necessity as well
as provisional authorities of each company. This is
likewise very clear under the prevailing circulars of
the NTC [National Telecommunications Commission,” said
Espinosa.
The
government also does not have the legal power to “free”
SMS since this would amount to an unconstitutional
deprivation of property and property rights, he said.
“Congress cannot enact laws that will say that SMS
should be free because that is unconstitutional,
essentially a confiscation of property or deprivation of
property without compensation.”
He said
in every country around the world where it is available,
SMS is a commercial service, adding there is no mobile
operator in any country which provides free
text-messaging service.
Digitel
senior vice president William Pamintuan said at the
sidelines of the company’s shareholders’ meeting on
Monday that if the government pursues this proposal, it
should also think of ways to subsidize the private
telcos’ investment costs.
“First,
there should be public hearings on this, and the
government should craft guidelines. Now, assuming there
are guidelines, who will invest in infrastructure? If
there are costs to putting up and expanding the network,
who will subsidize and pay for it? Not us, of course,”
said Pamintuan.
Worse,
he added, voice calls would be subsidizing SMS if text
messaging is offered for free. This in turn will result
in higher voice-service fees. “We cannot just offer [for
free] a service in which we heavily invested. If we do,
SMS could be just as well be subsidized by voice-call
service. Consumers will be paying for it,” he added.
Globe
senior vice president Rodolfo Salalima echoed PLDT and
Digitel’s comments. He urged the government,
particularly the Department of Transportation and
Communications, to sit down with the private sector
about the proposal before deciding on anything.
“Let a
study be made first before any serious pronouncements
are made. Let us sit down together rather than make
earth-shaking announcements and give the parties
concerned a chance to comment on it first,” said
Salalima.
PLDT
urged the government to consider that the mobile
industry has created a microbusiness out of e-load
service, which provides income to more than one million
families.
“Free
text will displace this source of income, and the worst
part is that it comes at a time when low-income families
need an income supplement from microbusinesses like
e-load. Also today, around 10 percent of ordinary
sari-sari store sales come from e-load,” said Espinosa.
He added
the mobile-phone industry has become so innovative that
it has been able to offer sachet loads that one can
essentially pay for one day’s use. “No other country
does that. We have been able to make communication very
affordable even to the lowest daily-income earner. For
only P15, one can subscribe to unlimited SMS. That
translates to about six to eight centavos per text
assuming that the subscriber sends an average of 200 SMS
in a day,” said Espinosa.
It had
been mentioned that US-based phone firm Verizon provides
free SMS, but Espinosa said this is not true. The
Verizon website says SMS is part of its post-paid plans,
while its basic plan requires the subscriber to per text
sent, and while its select and premium plans include
unlimited, it is actually already included in the price
of the plans— so that it is already paid for.
The
firms said the Philippines has one of the lowest SMS
charges in the world, true to its reputation as the text
capital of the world, all “because SMS is very
affordable and within the reach of even the lowest daily
income earner.”
Unlike
electricity charges, water charges, and transport fares
which are all going up, “SMS pricing has not increased
but instead has decreased dramatically over the years,”
said Espinosa.
Meanwhile, after calls for the refund of cost of
electricity passed on by the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco)
to its consumers, legislators now want telecommunication
companies, which they claimed earned huge profits, to
repay their more than 40 million subscribers by reducing
the cost of text messages.
In a
news conference on Monday, Speaker Prospero Nograles
that since the 12-percent return on investment rate cap
was removed by Republic Act 7925 or the Public
Telecommunications Policy Act of 1995, the return on
investment of telecoms has reached 36 percent.
He said
the proposal of Rep. Santiago (Joseph of Catanduanes) to
lower rates is to restore the cap, and then give back
the excess over the ceiling to consumers. The House
committee on information, communications and technology
headed by Santiago has been tasked to look into this.
In the
same conference,
Santiago
said that at present his committee is reviewing RA 7925,
with a view to “plug the loopholes.”
Santiago
said that if the proposal to make the text messaging
free of charge not did materialize, the telecom
companies could make free 100 text messages a day or
lower the SMS to 25 centavos.
“Beyond
100 SMS, they can charge,”
Santiago
said.
He said
that besides the SMS, the House, particularly his
committee is looking if call rates could be lowered.
(With Fernan Marasigan) |
